


real or not real

by mindthewolves



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-24
Updated: 2017-09-03
Packaged: 2018-10-23 15:02:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 34,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10721712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mindthewolves/pseuds/mindthewolves
Summary: Kara wins the Games, but Lena wins the auction.(a.k.a. supercorp slow burn in a hunger games au, because give me a lena who hasn't given up on family, who hasn't quite decided where she stands. give me a kara who's compromised. give me a lex who can be saved.)





	1. Chapter 1

I. (lena)

lionel luthor dies on a tuesday. they say it was a knife in the dark, poison, a heart attack, an aneurysm. there are many stories.

the funeral is held on the outskirts of capitol, for capitol is about pleasure and about power, and within its walls there is no place for the dead. your father’s body is carried out on a bier, flanked by an honor guard, guided by a soldier with a holo. you follow carefully in her footsteps, place every foot right. the pods stay sleeping. 

it is late fall, and the earth is frozen. it takes your father grudgingly. the leaves under your feet are frost-glazed and red as blood. your brother sings into the barren wasteland, his voice quiet and unvarnished but somehow real, solid in a way few things in capitol are solid. because it was lionel that took you in, but lex that sang you to sleep at night. lex that made you family.

this morning you cut melia flowers from the gardens and now you give one to lex, one to lillian. your mother’s gloved fingers brush yours, and she flinches. you pretend not to notice. the soldiers escort you back to capitol, away from this moat of ghosts that stands between it and the districts.

there is a feast afterward, for it is also a celebration – more coronation than election as your mother succeeds your father. the districts toast her health.

on wednesday you and lex play chess. in the larger scheme of things you have always been the white knight to lex’s black, your parents the players. every board, every game, is an ecosystem in fragile balance, and all things tend toward entropy.

for the first time in a long time, you lose. you’re just surprised it took you so long to see it.

it’s the servants who tell you. they say nothing, of course; they have no tongues to shape the words. but you see it in the way they bow to you, shallower than yesterday, the way they watch you, bolder than yesterday. this is how you know.

servants understand power; they have the measure of it the way a fisherman knows the currents. they know your influence was always borrowed, an extension of your name, your father your shield. now that he’s gone, you’re back to being a not-quite luthor, fallen from favor. when they vote to reduce the tessera ration, your words no longer carry weight.

your father has not been dead a week when lillian sends you to train with the peacekeepers. it is a pretty name for exile. she will forge you into a weapon as lex is a weapon, all steel and hard edges. lex helps you pack.

in district two you are given a company of peacekeepers under your command. they know who you are, they know you do not have your mother’s favor. they are each and every one better fighters than you. but you learn. you swallow your pride and step into their shadow and they teach you. they teach you with bruises first, strikes that steal the breath from your lungs despite the armor, holds that send you into panic as your body bends too far too far against its grain. 

one day you watch the careers train and realize that your peacekeepers have been kind by comparison. it is your first glimpse of bone splintered through skin. “we’re the lucky ones,” one of your peacekeepers - james - says to you when he catches you watching. “we aged out before we ever stepped foot in the arena.”

the company begins training you in earnest, calling out suggestions, correcting your form, demonstrating. you no longer lose all your matches, although you don’t win them all, either. and slowly, slowly, you untangle yourself from your family’s name.

summer finds you in district eleven. there is more green here than you’ve ever seen and more quiet, just the sound of the breeze as it shimmers through the leaves. the sunlight lies heavy on your skin. 

after hours, when the groves are empty, james reaches up to pick a peach from the tree and hands it to you. you take it, laughing - your heart is lighter here, where the world seems less broken - and even though it is reckless and stupid you bite into it, the first thing you’ve eaten in years that an avox has not first tasted. (you are on your third avox.)

the next day your peacekeepers catch a boy stealing from the orchard. forty lashes for theft, you know the law as well as anyone, and in the shade of the plum trees you are broken of your reluctance to hurt another. the first few blows he glares back at you, eyes defiant and on fire, and then you see the moment his eyes empty and he’s there but not-there. you are protecting your family’s interests, your country, but the boy is small and you wonder if the skin of his back will fit forty lashes. and then it’s done, and it does. you are glad of the helmet to hide your eyes.

after, you sit on your bunk, your eyes as blank as the district eleven boy’s. the light changes - a shadow darkening the doorway - and you sigh. the shadow comes in uninvited, and sits at the foot of your bed. sara. quick to anger, quick to forgive, with a tongue to match, you hadn’t thought she could be this quiet. in all these months she is the one peacekeeper you have never beaten in a sparring match.

“how do you do it,” you ask.

“by lying to myself, mostly.” she draws one knee up on the bed, the sole of her shoe leaving a muddy print on your sheets. “I tell myself that if I’m harsh today, he won’t do something tomorrow that will make me put a bullet in his head. this is the dirty work, lena. this is how panem survives.”

you hand her the tin of salve you’ve been worrying between your fingers. “don’t tell them it’s from me.”

weeks later, a hovercraft brings your company to district twelve. it also brings you a letter from your mother, stained at the throat with the capitol seal. you will be allowed home for the games.

 _bring me a souvenir_ , lex writes, and you resolve to bring him a lump of coal.

at the reaping you can’t help but watch the expressions of the crowd: the profound relief, something close to joy that it’s not them not them not them. not this year. you escort the tributes to the justice building and you try to be gentle. they do not fight. the lines of the boy’s palms are dark with soot; he has already started in the mines, and you have never so much as made toast. the girl has the grey eyes of the seam. they were dead the moment their tiles were drawn, and you do not remember their names.

(carter. thea.)

you watch the rest of the reaping from the barracks, and know you’re close to going home.


	2. Chapter 2

II. (kara)

you have 24 tiles in the reaping. tesserae for people who aren’t even here anymore, people you couldn’t save. they whisper about you in town. you are cursed, they say, to lose everything you love, and so you are not surprised when it is your name they draw, one week shy of your nineteenth birthday.

because in spite of everything, you love this life. the smell of the bakery and the smoothness of the flour meant for the capitol. the stories you trade between yourselves to the rhythm and scrape of the grindstone. the warmth of a hard-boiled egg in each pocket on your way to the fields in winter, like small suns in your hands (you’d hand one to your dad when you got there, and he’d make you laugh by peeling a circle at both ends and blowing the egg out of its shell, like a cicada during the molt.)

but that was a long time ago; you make the long walks in the mornings alone now. your work is your solace. the planting, the harvest, the threshing, the winnowing - if you are lucky they eat up the hours, and you do not wish for impossible things. if you are lucky your body is tired enough, the kind of tiredness that sinks into your bones, and you do not dream at all.

other nights your heart aches with dreaming. you climb up on the roof of one of the silos and watch the district sleep. you breathe in the stars, and when the sun burns them away you watch the people, neighbors and strangers both. a boy pulling up the hood of his little brother’s jacket against the rain. the baker, who gives second and third and fourth free samples to those who look hungry, though it’s a terrible way to run a business. you smile at the small kindnesses.

the peacekeepers bring you to the station, your partner tribute behind you, and your hair whips around you as the train pulls in. once, as a child, you dropped a thermometer (“these things happen,” was all your mother said as she swept up the glass, even though you knew it must have cost a fortune). she herded up the tiny beads of mercury between two slips of paper, and dropped the liquid silver into your waiting palm. this train is like that, a gleaming serpent pouring itself across the mountains.

one of the peacekeepers offers his or her hand (hard to tell, under that dark visor) to help you board. you are not sure what to think of this strange chivalry. the male tribute follows, and you both look out the window at your home falling away from you, the silos shrinking, the endless fields turning into a patchwork quilt of greens and yellows as the train speeds you ever closer to the capitol. 

the other tribute turns to you. “i’m winn,” he says, even though you already know, just as he must know yours. 

“kara.” 

“wish we could’ve met under better circumstances.” he smiles, and it’s a real smile, as though the two of you are not days away from stepping onto a bloody field.

you make your way through the cars (“so I know we’re both going to die, probably, most likely, but can I just say that this is amazing,” winn says when you poke your heads in the sleeper cars). most are eerily empty, even of peacekeepers, but then winn freezes in the doorway to the dining car and you nearly barrel into him.

the long table on one side of the car is covered in tiered silver platters, piled high with food. where the table ends, a tall woman has a man pushed against the dining car wall, one arm twisted behind his back. his free hand still holds a flute of champagne.

“–so you’re not going to give them any dubious advice, and you’re _not_ going to steal anything from the capitol this time. got it?” she hisses into his ear.

the man doesn’t answer her, glances at you and winn instead. “hello, friends,” he says, calm as could be. to the woman he says, “do you mind?”

she eases up, and he mutters, “I got you out, didn’t I?”

“ _you_ tried to steal sponsor gifts and nearly got me killed!”

“‘nearly’ being the operative word.”

“ignore him,” the woman says lightly, “i’m alex. that’s cole.”

so these are your mentors.

you’ve seen her before. in the games six years ago, and from afar. you’d lie awake on the sloping roof of the silo and look at the victor’s village, the stone houses with their warm lights, and you’d imagine the people in them. not with envy - you know what price they paid for it - but with a certain longing nonetheless. to be untouchable, to be safe, to be able to come back.

she’s beautiful in person. short, dark hair cut just below the line of her jaw; a soft grey shirt that doesn’t quite cover the red, raised scar over her clavicle. she looks deadly as ever. uncompromising, to judge by the set of her mouth, but not unkind.

cole is older, won his games a decade before you were even born. stole his opponents’ food and clothes and left them to die of exposure in the tundra of the arena. a fingersmith, they call him in the district, a thief. they say it fondly. he was alex’s mentor, taught her her way around a knife.

cole passes you a plate. “eat up. never know, could be your last meal.”

“you look a little green,” alex says, pointing at winn with the tines of her fork as as the four of you sit down.

“thank you, maybe because I have about a four percent chance of survival right now.”

“it’s actually closer to two percent, if you take into account the career districts.”

“as touching as this existential crisis is,” cole says between bites, “I think the more pressing question is, do you have any useful skills between the two of you?”

“we’re from district nine, we harvest grain,” winn says. “not exactly a blood sport.”

cole sighs. he runs a hand through his greying hair. “may the odds be ever in your favor.”


	3. Chapter 3

III. (lena)

the dark beats of the drums shudder through the ground, into the bones in your feet, up into your lungs. complex patterns layer one over the other, shifting, feinting, spinning away as the air thrums with this heartbeat, steadier and stronger than your own. you give in, let the drummers beat your heart for you.

the world is sharper like this, everything heightened in the fevered torchlight and the feral pulse of the drums. it slips into your blood, something wilder and more alive than you’ve been in a long time, the whisper of a storm in your veins. it lingers even when the last beat fades and the drums fall silent.

you sit at lillian’s left hand, lex at her right, as the first chariot enters at the other end of the avenue and the crowd goes wild. the district one tributes wave. the girl is stunning, cream dress luminous against her dark skin, her mantle embroidered in gold thread and draped over one shoulder. her partner tribute wears matching robes and a crown of silver leaves in his dark hair. someone in the crowd throws him a bracelet and he catches it easily, grinning as he slips it on his wrist.

the next chariot is drawn by a pair of black horses, armored from ears to muzzle in metal plate. both tributes are dressed in leather tunics and silver vambraces made of small overlapping plates, like a fish’s scales. they wear helms shaped like lion’s heads, throwing their faces into shadow. they do not smile. 

you know the boy, even under the helmet. he’s young for a career, only fourteen, slender limbs and soft curved cheek belying a ruthlessness that will serve him well in the arena. you’ve seen him train with the other careers back in district two; you remember the sound of bone breaking.

the district four tributes pass in front of you, draped in sheer greens and blues with a fishing net thrown over their shoulders like a cape. the horses’ necks are painted with gills in metallic blue, and the girl wears a branch of white coral in her dark hair. she looks directly at you, pressing a kiss to the tips of three fingers and holding them out to you.

you nod in acknowledgement.

lex leans in and whispers, “cat has outdone herself this year.” he nods to the screen suspended over the avenue.

you follow his gaze. DISTRICT 9, proclaims the blocky font at the top of the screen. the tributes in question are too far down the avenue to see clearly, but onscreen they loom larger than life. a girl with hair the color of grain. a boy with kind eyes and a hesitant smile, who looks too soft to ever take a life.

their costumes are simple – the girl in a sleeveless black dress secured at the waist with a wide belt plaited from stalks of wheat, the boy in a matching coat with braids of wheat at the cuffs – and you see what lex means. the games are meant to be spectacle, and this is the opposite of spectacle. the design is brazen in its simplicity, verging on defiance.

sure enough, your mother’s lip curls.

“don’t worry,” lex says to you when you find him in his room after the procession. “cat has nine lives. she’ll be fine.”

(and she is, in the end, but these are her last games.)

lex is barefoot, dress shirt untucked and unbuttoned, the ends of his tie draped over his neck like a scarf. you laugh to see him like this. casual. it’s in these moments that he’s just your brother, not the luthor heir, not a boy who belongs to capitol and to its people.

“come here,” he says, and you take a seat as he helps you take the pins out of your hair. the mountain of pins grows as you scroll absently through the files on his desk’s user interface: gene sequence database searches, articles on transgenic animal models, experimental protocols. even a few sketches of imaginary, impossible creatures, complete with shading and fur and feathers and a legend for scale.

“you still draw.”

he smiles. “helps me think. there, all done,” he says as he removes the last pin and flips your hair into your eyes.

you reach up to muss his hair in retaliation (eye for eye, tooth for tooth) – but it’s buzzed short and looks neat as ever, despite your efforts.

lex smirks. he throws himself on the bed, propping his feet up on the wall. “care to make a wager this year, little sister?”

“hardly fair, considering you’re a gamemaker.”

“gamemaker-in-training,” he qualifies. “I only make the mutts.”

“you know the arena and see the training sessions.”

he turns to look at you. “whatever I know, I’ll share with you. and I’ll get you into the training sessions. you can be my plus one.”

“what’s to stop you from setting a flesh-eating tortoise on my tribute the second they enter the arena?”

lex scoffs. “first, there’s no such thing. yet. second, tortoises are slow. you’d be a terrible gamemaker, lena.”

“you’re dodging the question.”

“fine, fine. I hereby solemnly swear et cetera that I will not single out your tribute or otherwise interfere with the games, directly or by proxy, except as a sponsor.” he holds up the middle three fingers of his left hand. “luthor’s honor.”

you can’t help but laugh. “oh yeah? what’s that worth?”

“lena,” he says, drawing out the first syllable like he used to when you were kids and he wanted a favor. “it’s no fun without stakes.”

“there’d better be caps on these sponsor gifts,” you say, giving in, and lex grins.

“you’re one to talk. who sends a fucking trident? that cost half our inheritance.”

“hardly; it was a tiny sliver. besides, I’m much more fiscally responsible now.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“if I win, you owe me a favor with mom. you’re the golden boy; she listens to you.”

he groans. “your vague favors are the worst.”

“take it or leave it.” you shrug.

lex caves. you knew he would. “but if I win, you teach me how to undo whatever it is you did to hack my room interface.”

(before you left for district two, you may or may not have spliced a few lines of code into the interface so lex’s room would set off wake-up alarms at random hours, complete with strobing lights and the most obnoxious music you could find on full blast.)

“done.”

“happy hunger games,” he says as you walk out of his room. you can hear the smile in his words.

#

lex is an outline in the dark as he shakes you awake. “you’re going to miss the training sessions.”

he doesn’t flick on the lights until you’ve pulled yourself into a semi-upright position, cross-legged on the bed. the room brightens by degrees, and you see that lex is holding a flat box out to you. he opens the lid with a flourish to reveal the green dress inside.

you run your fingers over the fabric, the simple lines. “did cat make this?”

lex shrugs, feigning nonchalance. “maybe.”

“when did you get up?” you ask, because he looks only marginally more awake than you feel, but he’s already in a tux. the shirt unironed, the tie sloppy, but a tux nonetheless. as always, he manages to wear it with as much disdain as possible.

“when your ungodly alarm woke me up,” he grumbles, and leaves you to change.

half an hour later, you walk through the doors of the training center. the elevators take you underground, and your stomach rises as you sink through the earth. the doors open onto a long hallway where the tributes are lined up before the testing room, waiting their turn.

you study them carefully as you and lex pass by: the district twelve boy, with a quiet desperation in his eyes that wasn’t there when you last saw him after the reaping, and the girl, whose palms are covered in bloody half-moons; the unearthly stillness of the district nine girl as her partner tribute fidgets nervously; the district four tributes, relaxed as they draw the tributes around them into conversation; the district two girl, who bites her nails as she waits (you expected better from a career.)

the testing room is a grander version of the training buildings in district two. there is a dizzying array of weapons mounted on the walls, and the holograms swirl with a cold light as the simulation stations are turned on for the day, working exactly as you designed them.

brunch is already underway, the gamemakers swaying slightly on their feet and their laughter brittle in the otherwise quiet room.

the head gamemaker hands you a flute of champagne. “miss luthor. glad you could join us.”

“aurelius, congratulations on your third consecutive games,” lex says, raising his glass in a toast. “long may you reign.”

you pile your plate high with waffles and strawberries and drizzle the entire thing with syrup before taking a seat next to lex. he gestures to an avox, who tastes one of everything on your plate, then on lex’s, before retiring. you wait a few minutes, but the man is still alive, seemingly with no ill effects, so you both start eating.

the testing room doors open again, and the district one boy walks in.

“you have fifteen minutes, tribute,” one of the gamemakers announces.

in between bites, you watch as the tribute takes a spear from the wall and throws it into the heart of one of your holograms from across the room. the pixellated form falls to its knees before breaking apart. he keeps up a steady tempo for the remainder of his time, and the gamemakers murmur among themselves. an eight, they finally agree, because the boy is strong but slow, his throwing stance too open.

the district one girl does better, a ten. she’s agile with her twin swords, fights like she was born to it. the tributes from two follow her, and earn themselves a pair of nines. 

but it’s the girl from three who catches your attention. she walks toward the fire-starting station, unhurried, and takes a box of circuits and other junk from the table. she settles cross-legged in the center of the testing room, the box beside her, and begins to take apart what looks like an old lighter.

after taking off the plastic housing, she rummages in the box for a battery and a boosting circuit, transplanting them into the lighter and threading two electrodes through the barrel. her hands are sure. she replaces the plastic cover, taping it shut, and clicks the lighting mechanism. a thread of current runs blue between the tips of the electrodes, and the girl walks out of the room seven minutes early, leaving the device on the floor behind her. 

aurelius is not impressed. even lex, who’s smart enough to know the device must do something, a presumably useful something, looks baffled. the gamemakers talk about a five, maybe a four.

“can you bring that here?” you ask an avox, and she does.

you unwrap the tape to examine the circuitry – elegant, even though it’s made entirely from scrap. you can guess what it does.

“put your finger here,” you say to one of the gamemakers, gesturing to the tip of the modified lighter. he obliges, the pad of his finger touching both electrodes, and you click the mechanism.

he goes boneless in his chair, slumping over his biscuits and gravy.

the district three girl gets a ten.

“she could give you a run for your money,” lex says admiringly. “too bad she wasn’t born in capitol.”

maybe it’s the champagne, but after that the tributes start to blur together. the pair from district four give a strong showing, nothing less than expected for careers, but nothing more, either. the boy from nine demonstrates his ability to distinguish edible plants from toxic, and you don’t have the heart to point out that lex, if he wanted, could engineer a garden to make that knowledge obsolete. of the district twelve tributes, one drops a knife in mid-strike and the other falls from the ropes course.


	4. Chapter 4

IV. (kara)

you are not particularly good at waiting. 

to your left, winn shakes his knee up and down, anxiety rolling off him in waves. you squeeze his hand and he squeezes back, giving you a panicked smile.

“for four consecutive years, the victors of the hunger games have all come from district one,” flickerman says. “do you feel a lot of pressure to continue their legacy?”

rhodia smiles. “I won’t be the one to break the streak.”

you believe her. you’ve watched her spar with the trainers, the way she makes it look more like a dance than a fight. effortless. and even though you’re not allowed to spar with each other, you’ve seen her teaching the other tributes how to hold a sword, nudging their stance further apart, telling them to remember to breathe as they fight. it won’t make much of a difference – three days’ training compared with years of work – but you admire her for it anyway.

maybe it’s naive, but – especially now that the training scores are posted – you’ve toyed with the idea of an alliance. you could trust her, you think, and the boy too, argent. it’s the district two boy you don’t trust; you’ve spent as much time watching the other tributes as you have training, and in the past three days you’ve seen him send two trainers to med bay even after they’d tapped out.

“lapis, everybody!” flickerman says as the boy leaves the stage.

on your right, wreath whispers to his partner tribute, “beautiful name for a cruel boy,” and you can’t help but agree.

tesla is next. flickerman waits for the applause to die down. “a ten. the highest training score from district three in as many years. tell me, how did you do it?”

“I guess you’ll have to wait and see,” she says with an enigmatic smile.

they’re quiet, the pair from district three. gauss is the same – not a fighter, but smart in an understated sort of way that reminds you of winn. for the most part you take your meals with alex and cole (sometimes cat, when she chooses to join you), but even so you’ve spoken to gauss a few times in the mess hall. he’s always unfailingly polite but also distracted, like he hasn’t quite wrapped his head around the fact that you are all moments away from going into the arena.

“and how do you find the capitol?” flickerman is saying.

“it’s very different from district four,” reef says. “people here are very stylish.”

the theater erupts in cheers, and flickerman laughs as he lifts reef’s hand in the air. as the boy walks offstage, he salutes someone in the audience. a very specific someone, a sponsor maybe – you saw bream do the same just before him, only she blew a kiss instead.

you look in the same direction, scouring the audience, and then you see them in the balcony, surrounded by peacekeepers in plainclothes. the luthor girl, her face impassive and half in shadow. her brother, smiling as he leans over to whisper something in her ear. she laughs, and something in your stomach twists. you’ve always known that the games are just entertainment to the capitol, but seeing it like this, seeing how happy the siblings are, how entertained, makes the bitterness rise in your throat.

winn nudges your shoulder. “you’re up next,” he hisses.

you reach the edge of the stage just as wreath steps down.

“good luck,” he whispers.

“and from district nine, kara zor-el!” comes the exaggerated introduction. “kara, what went through your mind at the reaping?”

under the bright lights, you shrug. there’s no good answer to this; you have no family to talk about, no one to go home to.

“come on, tell us what your first reaction was.”

“ecstatic,” you say flatly. the audience is silent.

“and we’re so excited to have you in this year’s games as well!” flickerman says, recovering admirably. “so, you received a training score of eight. pretty decent. do you feel confident going into the arena? what’s your strategy?”

“I don’t really– you know, just try to survive I guess.”

“well, we wish you all the best. are you aware that you are the oldest tribute reaped for the hunger games thus far?”

“I– no, I didn’t know that.”

“in fact you’ll turn nineteen in the arena, is that correct? your birthday’s in two days.”

you blink under the bright lights as you look into the audience, and the anger rushes through you again. “sure, if I haven’t died by then. I’m sure it will be entertaining either way.”

(“what the _fuck_ are you doing,” alex yells at you later while winn tries to sidestep her. “poking at the capitol doesn’t make them feel guilty, it only makes them defensive, and it’s not going to help keep you alive.”

cole watches silently, leaning against the wall, arms crossed.)


	5. Chapter 5

V. (lena)

lying on the floor of lex’s room, you choose rock.

lex chooses paper, and turns to engulf your hand with his. “I’m going with the district one girl, what’s her name, rhodia.”

“you’re so predictable.”

“no, it’s good math. she has the best odds.” he’s slurring his words now, the bottle of wine resting between you more empty than full.

“whatever helps you sleep at night.”

“and you? who’s it going to be?”

 _the district three girl_ , you open your mouth to say, but what comes out, weirdly, is “kara.”

lex frowns. “why? I mean, I know you have a soft spot for underdogs, but she’s middling at best.”

you shrug. 

he props himself up on one elbow to take a swig directly from the bottle. “what?” he says when you grimace, and offers you the bottle.

“keep your germs.”

“I was always taught to share.”

“you shouldn’t be drinking anyway; you’re sick. also, lillian definitely did not teach you that.”

“no. but dad did.”

he reaches for the bottle again, but you move it slightly out of reach. you take his wine glass over to the tap, fill it, and bring it back to him.

“tastes like water,” he says, making a face, but he drinks it all. he sets the glass beside him and looks over at you, his eyelids heavy. “actually, it makes sense.”

“what does?”

“you, picking that district nine tribute. she kind of reminds me of you.”

you laugh. “why, because we’re both middling?”

“no,” lex says, suddenly sober. “because nothing scares you.”

and you don’t tell him how wrong he is, how while he and lillian wined and dined capitol’s elite, you pulled up her interview on your desk and watched it over and over. _I’m sure it will be entertaining_ , she’d said, and there was steel in her eyes and there were ghosts. even now you can’t put a name to it, but something about the way she refused to play the game, the way she looked ready to burn the world to the ground and burn with it, like she was past saving and knew it – it made you want to save her anyway.


	6. Chapter 6

VI. (kara)

“I branded you, kara,” cat says as the glass slides closed around you. “don’t let me down.”

you raise your hand in goodbye as the platform lifts you up, up, until she disappears from view. there’s nothing but steel and glass surrounding you, the air growing warmer the higher you go. when you emerge it’s in the middle of a clearing, and for half a second you want to laugh, because it looks like home. the tall grasses stretching in all directions behind you, the clean blue sky above. mountains towering in the distance, crowned with fog.

“60 seconds, tributes.”

only the cornucopia gives it away. you’ve never seen one made of anything but solid sheets of metal, but this cornucopia looks almost woven, a loose silver lattice that offers no shelter, no defense. you can see the supplies from here: food, water, weapons. 

there are knives maybe fifteen steps away, but you’re terrible with them; you have the nicks on your hands to prove it. there are dual swords, throwing spears, an axe, but you think of these as belonging to the tributes they were meant for. and then there is a scythe, the blade coming off the tang straight instead of bent, the metal rippling like wood grain and bright. you could use a scythe.

you glance at winn, and he gives a shaky smile back. you have a plan.

 _run_ , alex said, and cole agreed. (so, not much of a plan, then.)

12 seconds.

from across the circle, gauss catches your eye and nods once, quick and desperate. you’re afraid for him. _trust me, yours is the good side of the circle to be on_ , you remember cole saying. _same number of killers, but less well-trained._

10.

 _the gamemakers want something, they want spectacle. you can use that. you’re playing against them, not the other tributes. you have more control than you think_ , alex said.

beside you, wreath folds his thumb and little finger into his palm. he doesn’t salute, just leaves his hand by his side. thorn does the same, a few tributes away, and you follow suit.

5.

4.

at the mouth of the cornucopia, rhodia flashes you the same gesture, and you nod. 

3.

 _don’t hesitate to kill_ , cole said. _only one of you is making it out of there alive. might as well be you._

2.

1, and everyone’s running. winn away from the cornucopia like he was supposed to; you and wreath towards it, so you can watch each other’s backs. you sling the two closest backpacks over your shoulder. wreath takes a third backpack, a jug of water, the closest knife, and then you’re running, both of you as fast as you can, leaving the screams behind you.

the grasses are taller than your head, and if the rustling doesn’t give you away, the trail of bent stalks behind you will. this is how you find winn, breathing hard in the middle of the field, and how thorn and rhodia find you. she has her swords; there’s blood on her shirt.

“not mine,” she says. “at least not most of it.”

“she picked up a stray,” thorn says. “hope you all don’t mind.” he pulls carter from the grasses behind him.

“where’s gauss?” winn asks.

“lost sight of him in the bloodbath. should we wait?”

you smell the tang of metal in the air, and you count the cannon shots. “no. let’s go.”

 

VII. (lena)

you crane your neck at the wall of screens in the gamemakers’ control room – kaleidoscopic, unedited feed, waiting to be wrangled and molded into a narrative.

“well, that’s just fucking inconvenient,” you say, and you make your voice hard.

lex glances at you, but he doesn’t call you on it. “inconvenient, i.e. interesting. it’ll be fun to see how this plays out.” he nudges your shoulder. “relax, alliances never last.”


	7. Chapter 7

VIII. (kara)

there are eleven cannon shots that first day. gauss is one of them, and maybe he’d be alive now if you’d waited. maybe you should have gone back for him. in another life you would have. the anthem plays, major key gilded in empty smiles and sugared lies. agra’s picture lights up the sky, followed by thea’s. you see it through the branches of the trees. thorn reaches out to squeeze carter’s hand. the younger boy turns, wraps him in a fierce hug. districts five, six, and ten have no tributes left.

“sleep,” you tell them, “I’ll take first watch.”

rhodia nods, curling up next to wreath in the space between tree roots, closing her eyes. winn zips up his jacket, pulling the hood over his eyes, and does the same. you marvel at their easy trust.

eleven down, twelve to go if you want to get out of this alive, and for a moment you think–

you shiver; there’s no fire, nothing to give away your position on the mountainside.

the district one girl first, she’s the trained fighter–

you turn the knife over and over in your hands, the heat of your palms bleeding into the metal. you press the pad of your thumb against the edge to test the bite.

and it would be so easy, but–

carter mumbles in his sleep, something about drop biscuits and honey, and you flush with shame, every inch of your skin hot.

you fold the knife closed, slip it into your pocket.

in the end, you let them sleep as long as you can before second watch. you put your hand on rhodia’s shoulder – lightly, so as not to startle her – and she comes awake instantly. you gesture with a jerk of your head, and she follows you a short distance away from the others.

“it’s almost dawn,” she whispers, breath pluming in the cold air.

you hear the thank you, but you say nothing.

“you’re leaving.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t be the one to–”

“hey. I spent my whole life preparing for this; I knew it would come to this. you had what, a few days? you don’t have to explain yourself to me.”

you shake your head. “I hope you win, you know. you deserve to walk out of here.”

“we all do.” she walks back to the others, to the supplies you’d portioned out between you, and hands you one of the backpacks. she walks with you to the edge of the stand of trees without a word.

“take care of them?” you ask, looking at the tributes behind you.

she nods. “of course.”

“I hope– I hope we don’t meet again.” it is not what you meant to say at all, but you think she understands.

you are almost out of earshot when she calls, “kara,” and you turn. she’s a dark wraith in the fog. “happy birthday.”


	8. Chapter 8

IX. (lena)

it’s morning and for once lex is not watching the games. you find him in his room, asleep, the simulated floor-to-ceiling windows drawn shut. lillian’s been by; there’s a bowl of soup and a glass of water on a tray next to his bed. the soup is cold, a translucent skin forming on the surface.

you send an avox for a fresh bowl, and when he comes back with it you wait until he takes a sip and doesn’t die before you dismiss him. you wake lex up so he’ll at least eat something. he’s pliable febrile, with none of the sharp luthor edges the rest of world cuts itself on. he looks far from dangerous.

“told you not to drink when you’re sick.”

he groans, but lifts the bowl to his lips anyway. “god, you’re worse than mom. what’s going on in the arena?”

“thirteen tributes left. no one died overnight. and you were right, they’re not allies anymore – mine left before dawn.”

lex sets the rest of the soup back on the tray (he’s only managed to finish half) and you dump a couple of antipyretics into his palm. “what was that in the control room yesterday?”

“what was what?”

“lena,” he says, and even burning up he manages to pin you with the intensity of his focus. “you’re my sister. you only cuss when you’re fronting.”

“go back to sleep, lex.”

he gulps down the medicine, wincing as he does. “you care. you didn’t want her to have to kill a friend.” he says it like an observation, gentle as he always is with you, with none of the disappointment that stains lillian’s voice when she talks about you. _it demonstrates a certain deficit of character_ , you imagine her saying, _a lack of strength. it can’t be helped; she’s not really a luthor._

“are you always this philosophical when you’re sick? I don’t remember.”

he smiles, a trace of sadness on his lips, a trace of insolence. “I love that you care. you’re the good one. but you have to see it for what it is. panem was built in a certain way, built broken, and the only thing that makes it structurally sound is this” –he gestures vaguely– “the games, the brutality. there’s no way out for us; we’ve inherited a terrible thing, and the world, the districts, they’re not just going to forgive us.”

you’ve seen the cruel boy who brings monsters out of nightmares and you’ve seen the brother who’s spent his whole life trying to make up for the coldness in this family, but you’ve never seen this desperation in him, fevered and honest. 

you think of telling him that maybe there’s another way, maybe the two of you could create it together. maybe you could fit the broken pieces back together one by one, smooth the jagged edges together until they don’t catch on one another anymore. the idea of it is a fierce, bright thing, and it flickers in you like a half-forgotten dream.

lex flops back onto the bed, snuggling into the pillow. you try to find the words but you don’t know how to show him, how to give bone and muscle and skin to your dream, shape it into something he can touch, something he can believe in.

“you came back different,” he says from behind closed eyes.

what do you mean, you want to ask, different how.

but his breathing is already ironed out with sleep, and you don’t wake him.

#

you pull up the camera feeds on your desk. kara’s crouched on the rainy side of the mountain, dozing despite the fact that it’s raining and the overhang she’s under doesn’t quite keep her dry.

the district four boy is closest according to the map, making his way through the mountains at a steady pace. when he steps out of the rain shadow, he grins, lifting his face to the sky and opening his mouth. it’s a precious commodity; beside the supplies at the cornucopia, there’s no other source of water in the arena. you watch on the gamemakers’ feed as they drop one of lex’s creatures into the arena next to him.

he freezes, joy crystallizing into alarm, but it’s only a foal. black as midnight, still unsteady on its legs.

he adjusts his grip on the scythe he’s been using as a hiking staff. there’s little food in the arena.

just as he’s about to attack, the foal nickers, skittering away. he follows, trying to keep his footing on the uneven surface, and finally throws the scythe with a shout as the animal gallops up a ridge. (on a different camera, kara startles at the sound and scrambles to her feet.) it barely grazes the foal’s shoulder, but when he crests the ridge in pursuit he finds himself face to face with a full-grown mare.

larger than full-grown, really, foamy lather accenting its dark coat. it bares its teeth – made for tearing instead of grinding, you’ve seen the hollow fangs from lex’s drawings – and emits a very unhorselike growl.

the boy grabs his scythe and throws himself backward, putting the blade between himself and the horse, thrusting at its muzzle when it comes too close. the horse rears when the blade makes contact, lashing out with its front hooves. it clips him in the ribs and he falls to one knee, still brandishing the scythe.

“you’re using that wrong,” kara shouts from behind him.

“what?”

“use it like this,” she says, mimicking a sweeping motion with her knife.

but he only half-listens, the small swings of his blade interspersed with panicked stabs. the horse is faster, and closes its teeth over his shoulder. he screams.

“give me that,” kara says, putting herself between him and the horse, and surprisingly he obeys. “run.”

she steps to the horse’s left, staying out of reach of its teeth. the rain makes the blade slippery, and she shifts her grip as she circles. when the horse lunges kara sweeps at its hind legs, easy as harvesting wheat, and the animal buckles. it watches her, kicking weakly as she walks closer, and she keeps her distance as she runs the blade across its throat. the foal is long gone.

she catches up with the district four boy not far away, leaning against a rock face and cradling his shoulder.

“thanks,” he gasps, breath coming fast now. he peels off his jacket and shirt. “is it bad?”

he turns so she can see his shoulder, and you hear kara’s sharp intake of breath. his skin is mottled from the top of his shoulder to his forearm and turning duskier by the second. the rain comes down harder, washing away the blood as soon as it seeps to the surface, and you see where the mare’s teeth have left a fairy ring of torn flesh. blisters rise along his back, filling with dark blood, pushing the layers of his skin apart.

“you can’t see it?”

he looks in the direction of her voice, eyes unfocused. “everything’s blurry.” he pulls his fingers into a fist and splays them out again. “my skin feels tight.”

kara presses her fingers along the puncture wounds, and as light as her touch is, he grimaces. she looks up at the sky of the arena as if the flawless blue will save him, but she’s looking in the wrong place. you know lex, the roads his mind travels, his sense of poetry, of symmetry. the poison is excruciating but survivable; there is always an antidote.

it’s the possibility of salvation just out of reach that makes for better tragedy, and there are clovers scattered everywhere in the sparse grass at kara’s feet. you’re ninety percent sure they’re laced with antivenin; you and lex used to wish on clovers as kids. but she’s not looking at them.

the boy is wheezing now. his eyes are wide over scarred corneas.

kara flips open her knife and pulls it across his throat. the first cut is too shallow and he screams, he digs his fingernails into the soft skin of her wrist with his good hand, he says please. she squeezes her eyes shut. after the second cut he says nothing at all.

she lays him down on the wet ground, gently, carefully.

you think something shatters in her then, but you must be wrong because when she turns to the camera she looks immortal, unbreakable. she wipes the knife clean on his discarded shirt and stands, her face carved in stone – eldritch and not quite human. she rubs her hands together until the rain runs pink, then clear, off her skin.

the sound of the cannon splinters through the trees, but she doesn’t even flinch. she takes one last look at the boy, dead on a mountainside far from home, and she walks away. 

she takes the scythe.


	9. Chapter 9

X. (alex)

tap tap tap tap.

cole is stretched out on the bed, watching the feed as the career pack draws closer to kara’s position. she’s curled under a rock ledge, reef’s torn jacket on over her own for warmth, backpack under her head. they’ve been too close for comfort all day, followed her footprints in the soft mud until they faded out where the rock began, but now that night’s settled in it doesn’t take them long to make camp. even careers need sleep.

you pour yourself another glass of scotch.

why cole’s chosen to make his proverbial bed in your apartment, on your actual bed, you have no idea. it’s an old ritual now, every time you’re mentors together. you sleep in shifts, and when it’s your turn to sleep he’ll turn the volume down low but the sounds and the flicker of the screen still seep through the fracture lines of your dreams. pick your poison, he’ll say to you after breakfast, and he’ll make you a drink, and he’s good at it. you’ll curl up on the chair and he’ll take up his position on the bed, legs crossed at the ankles. relaxed, almost lazy, but always watchful. the games will already be on; they’re always on.

tap tap tap.

you’ve learned to gauge his agitation by the rhythm he taps out with his ring against the mattress frame. it’s morbid the way he carries that ring around – it was his token in the arena, and why hold the reminder of it against your skin? but he does, and you do, though the scars you wear aren’t something you can just slip off.

the anthem plays on the screen, and the pictures of two tributes go up: reef and the district seven girl, ash. winn watches with the others in the alliance, neck craned to the sky like they’re watching stars; kara doesn’t watch at all.

tap. tap tap.

“will you stop that?” you uncross your legs on the chair and nudge his shoulder with the sole of your foot.

he does, astonishingly without complaint. “well, we’ve kept them both alive through day two, which is more than I can say for last year–” he says, trailing off at the knock on the door. “ten credits says it’s pretty boy coming to cry foul at what kara did to his tribute. you know, didn’t think she had it in her.”

“you know finnick hates it when people call him that,” you say as you get up to answer the door.

“which is why I said it when he wasn’t in the room,” cole drawls. “see how that works?”

but it’s not finnick. it’s president luthor’s daughter. on the list of people you’d least expect to show up at your door, she’s the last (and it’s a long list). you’ve seen her from a distance, at the galas before and after the games, working the crowd with her brother. they say she’s not really a luthor, but that she’s just as cruel. they say her brother makes the mutts, but she makes the pods – the dangers you cannot see, and cannot run from. they say she killed her father. and seeing her just on the other side of the door? you believe every word.

because her skin is white as snow, lips red as blood, hair black as midnight, and she reminds you of nothing so much as the bright colors of a coral snake. her beauty is her warning. and her eyes– in this light they’re the dark green of new leaves, but what comes to you is the old rhyme: leaves of three, let them be.

“what do you want?” in retrospect maybe you should have said this better; even cole tenses, gets to his feet in one smooth motion.

the luthor girl looks unfazed, amused possibly. “I have an offer for you. –are you going to let me in, then?”

cole pads across the room, coming to stand just behind you. “of course, have a seat. I’m cole.”

she smiles. “I know who you are, cole.”

you don’t give your name, and she walks in like she owns the place. in fairness, you suppose she does, or her family does. (you’re not inclined to be fair.)

“so what’s your offer?” if your voice is shot though with hostility, you’ve been awake for the last 24 hours and you could be sleeping by now if not for her.

“I’d like to sponsor one of your tributes. specifically, kara.”

“sponsors don’t usually knock on our doors at all hours of the night.” you check your watch. it’s only eleven thirty.

“I know it’s a little unorthodox. I came because I know the sponsor gifts are at the mentors’ discretion, but I wanted to send something specific.” she holds out a black credit card, and when you don’t take it she drops it into cole’s palm instead. 

“and what’s that?”

“something for her birthday – cake, tiramisu, whatever she likes.” she looks from cole to you. “is that a problem?”

“she’s in the middle of the games and you want to throw her a party?” you say at the same time as cole says, “no, no problem,” his voice smooth as bourbon.

“I didn’t realize she had so many more appealing options for food,” she says coolly. “unless she wants to go back and carve up that mutated horse, which I don’t recommend. I’ll sponsor her regardless; it’s not contingent on whatever you decide to do.”

“is that what a luthor’s negotiation tactics are worth these days?” cole says, words flowing slow like molten glass.

her mouth twists with amusement. “I was never very good at being a luthor.”

and maybe it’s a line, but it’s the smudge of bitterness in her words that makes you pull up the interface on the desk. cole reads the numbers off the card as you type. it costs a staggering amount of credits, but you send in two pastries: one savory, braided with sausage and scallions, the other sweet, with egg custard at the center. nothing overtly celebratory. you add a few candles and a box of matches, and hope kara’s smart enough not to waste them.

you duck back into your room to check on the feed. kara’s still sleeping, protected by rock faces on three sides. it’s a good position, defensible.

“what are you having?” you hear cole say from the other room. the four horsemen, you’re about to say when he clarifies, “you. luthor.”

she sounds flustered. “oh. –can you make an irish coffee?”

“I guess we’ll find out. come on,” cole says, appearing in the doorway a moment later with lena trailing behind him.

she stands in the corner, arms crossed as she watches him brew the coffee. “so, a bartender _and_ a thief.”

the parachute sways in the breeze, scraping against the rock ledge as it floats down, and kara bolts awake. her grip on the scythe eases a little when she sees the white bell of the parachute, but she doesn’t let go as she reaches out with her other hand to grab the canister.

lena walks a little further into the room to get a better angle on the screen as the smell of coffee permeates the room. you should have sent kara a drink. something warm. you can see the gooseflesh on her skin.

she unties the parachute from the metal canister with careful hands, saves the string, saves the fabric. she settles with her back against the rock, and only then opens the canister.

cole tops off the whiskey with cream poured over the back of a spoon, and holds it out to lena. she hesitates, and he takes the mug back for a moment.

“here,” he says, sipping the coffee through the cream, “perfectly safe,” and hands it back.

she gives a surprised laugh and takes it this time, cradling the mug between her palms. “thank you.” she sits at the foot of your bed and watches the feed, perching on the very edge as if unsure of her welcome, and you wonder how it’s come to this, that not only has cole installed himself as a permanent fixture in your room, there’s a luthor here too, however temporary.

kara nibbles on the bread, eating only a quarter of both. good – she’ll stay hungry enough to keep her on her toes, but not so weak that she can’t fight. and she’s trying to stretch the food, which means she’s thinking about tomorrow. you and cole have mentored enough tributes to know that the ones who stop looking forward, who give up – they get reckless, and they die fast.

she puts the leftover bread back in the canister, tucks the canister in her backpack. maybe there’s a breeze, or maybe it’s the altitude, but she tugs her jackets closer around her and settles back down to sleep. before she closes her eyes though, she looks directly at the pinhole camera and mouths, _thank you_.


	10. Chapter 10

XI. (kara) 

on the second night there was bread. 

the gifts come like clockwork now, things you don’t even need, and you’ve never heard of sponsors so generous. 

the third night is coffee, brewed dark and a few handfuls of sugar away from being palatable. the mug warms your fingers as the anthem plays, and when the pictures of the fallen go up you grip the handle so tight your knuckles turn white. in the photo winn is smiling. look vicious, lift your chin, narrow your eyes, give me savagery, you were told when you lined up that day to be photographed in the training center (there were twenty-four of you then), and most of you looked grim and brutal and cold but winn? he laughed into the camera instead; he couldn’t pull off vicious to save his life.

you stare so long that when you close your eyes you still see the ghost of him, the colors printed in reverse on the insides of your eyelids. you wonder how he died. the second photo is bream’s and you wonder if he fought a career and lost. the cannon shots had come close together, early in the afternoon.

nine left.

and then you understand the coffee, understand what alex and cole are trying to tell you. the careers are out hunting and you are next. you get to your feet.

the coffee spills through you until you are humming with restlessness. your pulse races in your fingertips, your mind brighter somehow even as your body is exhausted, hollowed out.

you walk the whole night, staying on the high ground and close to the rainy side of the mountain, feeling the ground with your feet because you’re blind in this darkness. a bird shrieks and for a moment you think it’s a tribute screaming, you think eight left, you think of reef and then you fold away the memory.

you make a game with yourself. just make it to that tree; then you can rest. and once you’re there – no, that tree, a little further on. that ridge. that boulder that looks like an elephant, draped in moss. every once in a while you catch yourself stumbling, and realize you’ve fallen asleep on your feet.

on the fourth night the only thing in the canister is a small envelope. you work a nail under the seal and shake the contents into your palm: a cluster of small pink and white flowers on a green stem. you must have put enough distance between you and the careers because it’s allheal, for sleep. and so you do.

you’re home again, the dirt roads warm under your feet, your soles caked in dust and there is a heaviness in the air, the sweet smell of storms, a sky marbled in distress. you run your hand along the corn stalks and the edges of the leaves nip at your palm like sharp teeth. it is the same dream, always the same dream. you thought you’d outgrown it; you haven’t.

the corn stalks are gone and your fingers are running along the smooth walls of the silo instead as you and your cousin walk the grain. the metal walls echo back as you talk about everything and nothing, and the words are garbled but you understand that you’re happy and the grain bridge kal’s walking on gives and he sinks. it’s slow, or maybe time eddies around you, but there’s time for you to see the horror in his wide eyes and his open mouth as it fills with grain and maybe you run to him and maybe you cry out but either way the grain is rising around you both now, or you are falling through the grain and it’s shimmering gold and heavier than you ever expected, like trying to swim through rock and it presses against your ribcage and you can hardly breathe.

you wake up in your own bed and your father is there and you smile and he says how your mother saved you and how she loved you and how the grain swallowed her in your place and his smile is jagged around his heartbreak. the tears come hot and when you look down at your hands your sleeping self knows your father is gone and dead and the blood of the boy you killed is hot on your hands, sticky, you carry him with you in the ridges of your skin and the lines of your palm. 

back home they say the creases on your hands show the map of your future and you wonder what the fortune teller would make of your hands now, what she’d say. a life washed in blood, probably, soon to come to a violent end, and you laugh even in the dream because you don’t need a fortune teller to tell you that, thank you very much, you’re perfectly aware.

#

the rock is cold against your cheek as the dream comes back to you in scraps and pieces, like cobwebs clinging to your skin. it's still dark out and it takes you a moment to realize what woke you – low whispers and the snapping of twigs under capitol-issue boots. your teeth hurt from clenching your jaw in sleep. 

you strip off reef’s jacket and wrap it around your backpack. it’s lumpy, but passably human at first glance. you leave everything but your weapons.

the path to the ledge is rocky and narrow and you’re grateful for this small blessing as you crouch in the shadows opposite, half-hidden in the bruised light of morning. blood hammers in your ears and you trace white plumes in the air with every breath.

when the careers come they’re loud and brash, like they have no need for stealth. there are three of them and it’s argent who comes over the slope first, slipping a little on the scree.

“got a live one,” he says, gleeful as a razor’s edge.

his focus is on the jacket you’ve molted as he hefts his spear and throws, easy, like it costs him no effort. the shouts of the other careers drown out your footfalls as you step in close behind argent, pull him back by the collar of his shirt and onto your knife. he falls to his knees, the blade slipping up into the soft space under his ribs, tearing through him under the force of his own weight. his blood pours black over the rocks.

killing reef was like ice and slush running through your veins, like your heart withering on the vine, but killing argent is different. it’s easier the second time.

you barely have time to pull the knife back before petra and lapis fan out along the ridge, closing you in. you throw your knife like alex tried to teach you but it’s not balanced for throwing and you were never very good at it anyways and you know, you know even before the hilt leaves your fingers that you’ve gauged the revolutions wrong. the grip hits petra in the upper arm before bouncing to the ground and now you’ve armed your opponent and how could you be so stupid, but it buys you enough time to pick up the scythe.

you stand with the blade between yourself and the two careers, and lapis flashes you a lazy smile.

he shakes his head. “sloppy technique. should’ve learned to throw it without spin.” he almost sounds sorry. “well, we can’t all be careers.” 

“more’s the pity.”

he gestures to petra, a slight tilt of his head, and both of them take a step closer. your chances of coming out of this alive are dropping precipitously.

fear tastes like iron on your tongue and there’s a tremor in your hands, but you force yourself to smile, to laugh. it’s a brittle sound, almost shatters in your throat, but it holds. lapis freezes. he doesn’t call your bluff – let him think he’s miscalculated – and you press the advantage. 

“afraid to fight me on your own?”

he doesn’t answer, but the muscle in his jaw twitches.

you bleed the tension from your body, loosening your grip on the scythe, narrowing your stance so you’re taller than him. and you mirror the smile he wore moments ago, slow and dripping with contempt. “so I guessed right. thought you were too young for a career.”

his jaw twitches again, a flush rising on his neck. “I’m young because I’m good. besides, finnick was my age when he won.”

“you’re not finnick,” you say softly. “tell me, have you actually killed anyone in the arena, or did the others do it for you?”

“I killed your district partner,” he sneers. “he begged on his knees for his life.”

out of the corner of your eye you see petra’s expression shift from curious to watchful, and you wonder if it’s even true.

“that’s a lie,” you say, and you try to keep your smile steady. 

“it’s not.”

“prove it.”

petra moves closer, tired of waiting maybe, tired of the game, but lapis raises an arm as if to hold her back. “this one’s mine.”

he turns back to you. his hands are empty.

you’re ready when he lunges, the scythe singing through the air as it arcs toward his stomach. but he moves like water, already dancing back, and before you can recover he’s stepping to the outside of the blade and his hands are closing over the shaft, bookending yours. you can feel the heat coming off his skin.

it’s pure reflex when you pull, trying to twist the weapon out of his hands, and he lets you, he pushes. he turns your momentum against you and you stagger, losing your grip on the scythe as you break your fall. your stomach turns over at your mistake.

lapis grabs a fistful of your jacket and lifts you to your feet. desperate, you kick at his shins but you don’t have the leverage. he slams his knee into your ribs and the pain blooms through you, unfurling, unfurling, bright and burning.

he pushes you against the rock, fingers settling around your neck and you’re twelve again, locked inside the grain and drowning. panic crashes into you like a tidal wave, pushing everything else aside, scraping you clean; but when it recedes it leaves something behind in exchange: a fragile clarity, a strange calm.

you’ll get to leave this arena, one way or another. sooner rather than later, if the lightheadedness is any indication. the world looks a little softer around the edges, the colors a little grayer. you wanted out and admittedly this is not quite how you imagined it, but does it really matter how?

you hold onto one thing and it’s this, that you won’t beg, not this boy. you won’t ask any favors.

there’s something unspeakably beautiful about the daybreak – the mountain limned in silver and the ceaseless migration of the clouds. it’s so quiet, like the earth is holding its breath, waiting for the sun. you can’t see it, not yet, but you take comfort in it all the same. the world keeps turning.

#

he lets you drop and your knees scrape and your head slams hard against the ground. your vision flickers in and out. from this angle you can see argent, pale and crumpled on the ground where you left him but eyes still open. lungs still breathing but just barely. he reaches out, clutching at lapis’ ankle, but the boy kicks him away.

it gives you an opening, and as he shakes argent off you plant your foot just above his locked knee and push, throwing all of your weight behind it. you hear the bone crunch, feel it through the thick sole of your shoe as the joint gives. you pin him with one knee between his shoulder blades as you take the knife from his belt. you work the point into the soft hollow at the base of his skull, and he goes limp.

the cannon shot startles petra into action. she runs at you with the knife you as good as handed to her and you raise your arm to block but it’s sloppy and slow and the serrated metal bites into your forearm. time stutters, and you feel the texture and tooth of each ridge on the blade as it etches your skin. you feel it, but not as pain.

catching petra by the wrist, you smash her hand against the rock until the knife clatters on the stone. she’s breathing shallow and fast and she looks at you, at the bodies broken on the ground beside you, and of all the possibilities you were expecting it was not this: she twists her hand out of your grasp and runs.

you watch her melt into the trees and you don’t follow.

when your heart pounds a little slower and your ears stop ringing, the pain comes back. dull over your ribs, just enough to make your breath hitch on every inhale; sharp and hot along the gash on your forearm, licking like fire.

“good kick.”

you almost don’t hear it.

“what a bastard,” argent says as he draws a shuddering breath, and this time his voice is stronger. he smiles – it’s a little stunted, a little shaky, but he manages.

as you look down at him he draws a knife from his jacket and even though he’s slumped on the ground, skin the color of paper, you take a step back in instinct and pick up the scythe. but argent takes the knife by the blade, holds the hilt out toward you. he can barely keep his hand off the ground.

“do what you need to do,” he says. “make it good.”

all you can think is how easy it is now, how right and wrong have slipped away from you in a matter of days. you know exactly how much force it takes to press through skin and muscle, bury the tip in his heart and twist the knife. it’s knowledge you never wanted, but you have it nonetheless. kindness has no home with you.

you kneel by his shoulder. you take the knife.

“will you tell me a story before you–? before.”

“what?” even though you heard him perfectly well. it’s an echo of something kal used to say. in the fields, when you were working – tell me a story. when he was bored – tell me a story. when you lay awake at night, back when your families lived in the same house – tell me a story. you’d trade stories back and forth, building on them and handing them off to each other. 

“something happy. anything.”

you were full of stories, once.

but that was a long time ago, and so now you tell the first story you think of. “there was a vigil when my mom and my cousin died. it was in the storehouse where we keep the grain before it’s shipped to the capitol, nothing special. there were so many people there, some I’d never seen before, but they came for my family. and cole – one of the victors from my district – he bought all the weeping candles; we could never have afforded them otherwise.”

you tell it brokenly, jaggedly; you’re years out of practice. argent closes his eyes. his breathing is irregular, like he’s forgotten how. 

“I don’t know if you have them in district one. they’re called that because the wax runs clear when it melts, like it’s crying. and these candles are thin, like– like blades of grass, plain white, about as long as your palm. we use them for funerals. the family sits at the back and people go around telling memories about the person who died. usually stories that were private, that not a lot of people knew. they give little pieces of the person’s life back to the family in the telling. and we go last. 

“it was raining that night and you could hear it inside the storehouse, like a blanket of sound over the world, and no one spoke. instead of stories, one of the guests took out a violin.

“he was a stranger to me – maybe my father knew him – but his music didn’t feel that way, didn’t feel like a stranger. it was like something you could reach out and touch. dark, like sugar when you burn it, a little sweet under the bitter. and it felt old–” 

all argent does is sigh, but you feel the shift in him as the tension leaves his body and he looks younger, more vulnerable than you’ve ever seen him. the second cannon rings in the air and you know it’s done. you finish telling the story anyway.

“–older than the trees, inevitable as rain. I’d never heard music like that in my life, and I’ve never heard it again. the elder in the room lit the first candle, and touched it to the next. I watched all those points of light spill over the room until my father lit mine, everything born from a single flame, and I was still sad but I also– it felt like my heart was quiet. like I would be okay, and my father would be okay. and you will be, too.”

 _something happy_ , he’d said, and it’s only when you’re done with the telling that you realize it wasn’t happy at all.

you rummage through his pockets and his backpack, take the extra water pouch and ration bars but leave the weapons. you have no use for so many knives anyway, and you’ll be glad to have fewer weapons in the arena once the hovercraft comes for the body. you leave the jacket, already stiff with blood.

“I’m really sorry, argent.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (AU-inside-an-AU:
> 
> dark!Kara sometime in an unspecified future, tucking her daughter into bed: once upon a time, there was a black horse, but it was poisonous, and it had these sharp, sharp teeth…
> 
> lena, from across the room: *eyes wide* *shakes her head*
> 
> kara: I mean, it wasn’t poisonous? and it had normal teeth? like for eating grass. and it was…a very nice horse. the end?)
> 
>  
> 
> #KaraTellsTheWorstBedtimeStories


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a/n: peacekeeper uniforms are now grey because I think the white looks ridiculous. also more military and less storm trooper-esque.

XII. (lena)

kara sleeps through the cannons, and the anthems. the fever burns through her, burns clean, and alex is frantic.

maybe cole is too, but he’s harder to read. he still pours your drinks slow when you drop by, as if there’s all the time in the world. still taps his ring on the tabletop as alex glares daggers at him. still gives you that practiced drawl – faintly mocking, sticky with sarcasm – his words caught in tree sap and hardening to amber. it’s too deliberate to be anything but affectation, but you understand it as a form of armor. it’s best not to show your true face in capitol, or your heart.

alex wears hers on her sleeve. it’s partly why you find yourself coming back to the training center apartments day after day. sometimes she looks at you with open enmity and sometimes with an uneasy trust, skittish as a kitten, but it’s always honest. tangible. she can’t hide her heart, and it’s a haven from the rest of capitol, where everything and everyone is something else in disguise.

“they’re going to kill her if she doesn’t wake up,” cole says from his spot on the bed. “they need the footage.”

you don’t disagree. it’s been a quiet couple of days: too few tributes left, widely dispersed among the arena. only the fact that lex’s tribute and her ragtag allies are close on the heels of the district two girl has saved her. you’re oddly grateful to them. in keeping the focus on themselves, they’ve protected kara from the camera, from the gamemakers’ scrutiny. 

despite the salve you'd sent after she killed the careers, kara’s heart rate and breathing had climbed, temperature rising until she lapsed into delirium – tossing and turning in sleep, a sheen of sweat on her skin. it’s going on 36 hours now and she hasn’t woken. at least the wound on her arm has stopped bleeding, but there are streaks of red at the edges of it, marbling her skin.

the gifts you sent after cluster in the moss around her like white mushrooms, unopened. there’s water with a precise ratio of electrolytes, medicine for the infection, all of it useless if she’s not awake to take it. it occurs to you that there are things you can’t send: consciousness, resilience, luck. the will to fight.

“I’ll take care of it,” you say, as if this is something you can promise. as if your word carries a gram of weight with the gamemakers.

alex follows you into the common room. you have one hand on the doorknob when she stops you.

“wait.” she rests her fingertips against the door, tilts her head a little as she takes your measure. 

you have no tells, not when you care to conceal them, but you wonder what she’s looking for, what she finds.

“why do you care so much?” she says finally.

“I could ask the same of you.”

“she’s my responsibility.” alex nods as she says it, as if she wears the weight of that duty like a crown. “you didn’t answer my question.”

but she lets you go. the rough shale walls of the apartment give way to winding hallways, lined in smooth panels of frosted glass and lit from within. the architecture is meant to disorient and it does; the illumination in the walls waxes and wanes like the push and pull of tides, like gravity coiling and uncoiling, and time seems to come unmoored.

the elevator takes you nine stories down. lex is waiting for you in the lobby, arms crossed, leaning against the shale wall.

“thought you might be here,” he says by way of greeting. you hear the warning underneath it: _people are starting to notice how often you come here._

“were you looking for me?”

he levers himself off the wall and falls into step with you. “board meeting in half an hour. mom wants you there.”

“that’s new. what’s the occasion? she’s never wanted me there before.” you can’t quite keep the bitterness from your voice. “I thought that was the point of sending me to the peacekeepers – cut me out of the decisions about policy.”

the corners of lex’s mouth tighten. “because you always go head to head with her. it–”

“–because I don’t agree!”

“lee, I know that. but it undermines her. it weakens her position in front of the board.”

instead of walking out of the training center, you swerve down a different corridor. “tell her I’m busy. I have to talk to aurelius.”

lex catches your elbow, the pads of his fingers warm through the fabric of your sleeve. 

you turn to study him, more carefully this time, and he lets you look. a flicker of – is that concern? or maybe guilt – slips across his eyes, there and gone. your stomach turns over. in front of the rest of capitol he plays a part, he performs himself, and the mask he wears is always seamless; but in front of you the mask is never perfect. it’s spiderwebbed with cracks and fissures, like he wants to be found out, wants to be seen.

“lex? what aren’t you telling me?” there’s an edge to your voice now, like a knife against the whetstone.

“we should go,” is all he says, and you walk with him to the justice building in silence, under the setting sun.

he climbs the spiral stairs up the the boardroom, and you follow.

you don’t know what you did wrong. you went to the peacekeepers when you were told, without protest; you came back when called. you’ve stayed out of lillian’s way. you’ve sold no secrets about the games, though even that would not be unforgivable. you’ve been…exuberant with your sponsor gifts, but you always are, and you’ve broken no rules.

“it’s not you,” lex offers, as if he knows your thoughts. you understand the sentiment behind the words, but it’s such a vague statement, imprecise and impossible to interpret.

he pauses in front of the boardroom, fingers curled lightly over the door handle. you can hear the murmur of voices on the other side. lex looks at you in the easy shorthand you have with each other – _are you ready?_ you nod, bracing for the blow without knowing when it will fall, or from what corner, and he opens the door.

you haven’t set foot in this room since your father died. it looks the same: the long table with its dark grain, the high-backed chairs. thirteen seats for the thirteen original districts. lex taught you to drink here, when you were fifteen. better to know how it affects you so you can recognize it later, he’d said as you winced at the taste. this way you know when to stop, this way you don’t spill secrets. it’s saved you more than once.

the room is the same, but some of the faces are different – you recognize rhea on the far side of the table, and a few of your father’s friends are conspicuously absent. lex takes the empty chair at lillian’s right. 

“lena, glad you could join us,” your mother says.

jack pulls out a chair for you beside him. “welcome back,” he whispers as you brush past him, but when you glance over at him he’s schooled his expression into one of polite disinterest.

you force your heart to calm, and you count your allies. lex. jack. they’re few and far between these days.

an avox sets an aperitif in front of each board member. the glasses are small and stemmed, the bell filled with a light green liquid.

“for panem,” lillian says, raising her glass.

the board echoes her words as they drink, and you do too. it’s sour and a little sweet, tasting faintly of apples, but not quite enough to mask the lacing of bitterness underneath. the poison lingers on your tongue.

you’re used to it now, the lightheadedness as it hits your empty stomach. your pulse is thready in your fingertips. you’ll get the antidote after the meeting; the chasers haven’t been withheld since lillian turned over half the board after your father’s death. _it fosters consensus_ , lionel had explained once.

“the board is concerned by rumors of insurrection among the peacekeepers,” lillian says. she doesn't elaborate, just waits. silence is its own strategy, blanketing the room like strangling vines, more and more untenable by the second. you've seen more than one person break under nothing more than the prickling of lillian’s continued silence. it worked on you as a child, many times. but today you wait with her. her weapons have dulled on you with time, and it's rhea who breaks the silence. 

“you oversee them; what's your assessment of the situation?" she says. 

"I'm in charge of one company out of the thirteen, not to mention the garrisons in the capitol; I can hardly be expected to speak to the the peacekeepers as a whole."

“your own company, then." a different board member, one you don't recognize.

“sorry, I'm lena, I don't think we've met." you reach across to shake his hand, smile when it throws him off balance. 

“corben.”

“they maintain order; they're competent considering they're district-born. I have no cause for complaint."

“but how would you gauge the threat?" 

"I wasn't aware there was one. perhaps the board should stop grasping after shadows. paranoia is not an attractive trait.” you can almost feel lex cringe at the head of the table, and you're almost sorry, but not quite. 

“you don't think they're being too lenient on the districts? maybe they need to be reminded of their loyalties."

“no. every infraction I saw was met with the appropriate sanctions as prescribed by panem law."

“and were there infractions you didn't see?" jack says, needling. it's a lowball question. 

“I’m not sure how I would know, considering that by definition I didn't see it.” you glance over at lillian. “am I on trial here? what is this about?”

“of course not. we simply thought you might be – informative, given your firsthand knowledge of the subject,” lillian says smoothly. “bring him in."

you watch as two avox servants drag someone in. a peacekeeper, you assume, but his head lolls forward and you can’t see his face. strange that the avoxes bring him in – they’re servants, not guards – but then you realize there hadn’t been any peacekeepers standing watch outside the justice building when you and lex came in either.

the avoxes let go, and the peacekeeper buckles to his knees. his clothes are torn, his hair wet, and there’s not a scratch on him but that means nothing in capitol. he smells of cologne, like he’s been cleaned up for this audience.

he looks up at you and his eyes are the warmest brown, feral and imploring at the same time. your eyes widen.

adam. you almost don’t recognize him out of the peacekeeper grey. you hardly know him, but you’ve seen him playing tag with the district children in off hours. he’s a strange choice for a peacekeeper.

“this soldier sold weapons to the district he was supposed to be policing. isn't that true?” lillian asks. 

“yes,” adam mumbles. his skin is ashen. 

“are you aware that the possession of weapons is illegal in the districts?”

“yes,” he says again, sluggish.

“gambling again, adam?” you say, hoping he’ll play along, hoping he hasn’t already confessed to something worse. “I thought we were clear about that. really, if you needed money so badly you could have just asked.” it’s a calculated risk; any vice is better than treason in the eyes of capitol.

but he only looks at you, confused, and you want to scream in frustration.

“he didn’t do it for money, lena,” says lillian, “although I admire your faith in people sometimes. no, he wanted to arm the districts for an uprising. he betrayed our trust. did you really not see it?”

“do you really think I would have let it happen if I had?”

“I thought I raised you to be more perceptive.”

you wonder how you’ve gotten yourself into this position yet again, across from lillian in a board room, fighting another losing battle in a losing war.

“we’ve seized the guns and executed the citizens involved. we expect you’ll be more vigilant in the future.”

“of course.” but even as you say the words you know it’s too easy. you’re missing something.

“shoot him.”

for a moment you’re bewildered – who would trust an avox with a gun, in a room full of the people who’d ordered their tongues torn out? – and then you see that lillian is talking to you.

adam doesn’t even react, his eyes unfocused. there’s something off about them, and when you look closer you see the way his irises beat to the left over and over, keeping time like a metronome. he seems to barely remember how to breathe. drugged maybe, or pushed halfway out of his own mind from what they’ve done to him.

 _make him an avox instead_ , you’re about to say, _make him live with his failure_. but across from you lex shakes his head ever so slightly, as if he knows what you’re thinking, and instead you ask, “here?”

“certainly not. we’re not barbarians, lena.” lillian gestures to an avox. “escort them back to his cell.”

you follow the avox as he hauls adam to his feet. the door swings shut behind you, but through it you can still hear the muffled sounds of the meeting as it’s adjourned, the clink of glass on wood as the chasers are passed out.

the avox takes you several stories down to the basement. here, the overhead lights flicker and the concrete walls are empty of adornment. there are no doors on any of the cells, only a raised threshold, and the floor slants toward a drain in one corner. imperfectly, because there is still a half centimeter of standing water above the tile. a tray of food lies untouched on the floor, and the head of the mattress is soaked through. 

adam stumbles across the threshold, docile, like a lamb to the slaughter. the avox pushes him to his knees on the stone. you think of the time you saw him in the seam, tossing a little girl in the air and catching her like she weighed nothing. he would be an easy scapegoat, you think. you wonder if he has younger siblings back in two. and you draw your gun, press it to the hollow at the back of his skull, fire.

“clean that up,” you say, turning away so the avox won’t see how your hand trembles as you holster the gun. you step out of the cell, and you don’t look back.

#

you wash your hands raw, but there’s still blood on your sleeve.

when you get back, the board room is all but empty. jack gives you a hug on his way out, tight but fleeting, and then it’s down to you and lex. he raises the last dose of antidote towards you like a toast, golden liquid in a tall glass.

you drink, and you slump into the chair next to him. the chaser is cloyingly sweet.

“he wouldn’t have thanked you for it, you know.”

“you should have let me try. they might have spared his life.”

“no. see to the end of the game, lena. best case scenario: the board agrees, that boy becomes an avox, you save his life, but he doesn’t see it that way. he holds a grudge, nurses it like a flame, feeds it matchsticks until it grows hot enough to burn us. and you never see it coming, because you feel guilty, you still feel like you owe him. he would’ve been a liability.”

you laugh. “and the worst case? let me guess. mom decides I’m not worth the trouble of pouring an extra chaser for, and you no longer have a sister.”

“I would never let that happen again.” his voice is rough, strained under the weight of what he wants to say. “never, lena. I’ll protect you no matter what.”

and you believe him.

“worst case, you make your appeal and the board refuses. you lose credibility with the board, you draw suspicion on yourself and on jack, if he’s trying to be noble and backs you. then you end up having to kill the boy anyway.” 

“I forget you think optimism is a disease.”

lex smiles, but it comes out more like a sigh. “you know he was just a whipping boy, right?”

“you think he was innocent.” you’re not sure if it’s a statement, confirming what you already know, or a question. “it crossed my mind,” you say when lex doesn’t answer. how the board room had felt like a stage, how sedated adam had looked and how – if he’d been guilty – he could hardly have done a worse job of hiding his sympathies. 

“mom wanted to make a point, and now she’s made it. she won’t test you again for a while.”

this has all been a warning to you, you realize. a sleight of hand, for your benefit. in lillian’s eyes your loyalties have always been suspect; you are too close to the districts. not a child of capitol after all. 

today is just an allegory.

lex gets to his feet, pushing the chair in behind him. “it’s late. are you going home?”

you shake your head. “I need to check the feeds,” you say, and he goes with you.

#

lex makes himself comfortable in the control room, one leg pulled up on a chair as he spins around and around, slowly, lazily. this is the mask he wears for capitol. he looks every bit the spoiled prince, but you know that with each revolution he’s taking stock, assessing the screens. 

“think your tribute caught the cold that I had?” he says on his next pass. his voice is light now, a dragonfly on water, as if your conversation in the board room never happened.

“the district nine girl?” the nearest gamemaker says, overhearing. “pay up, her fever broke. she was awake earlier, actually. drank a small lake’s worth of water and threw it back up before passing out again.”

you let out a breath you didn’t know you were holding. lex slips the silver bracelet from his wrist with a smile and tosses it to the gamemaker. on her it falls halfway down her forearm.

you look at lex, incredulous. “must you bet on everything?”

“relax, sister mine. I’ll win it back. eventually.”

“ready the anthem,” aurelius says from the far side of the control room before walking over. “miss luthor, twice in one week. to what do I owe the pleasure?”

“just here to keep an eye on my brother, make sure he doesn’t bend the rules of our bet.”

lex puts his hand over his heart. “I would never.” but he’s grinning, because he’s the one who taught you to play the game-within-a-game.

in chess, first. he uses his knights like a scalpel, and you learned to take those pieces first, to hobble him. he’s loath to sacrifice, even for pieces of equivalent value. but on the rare occasions he does it’s because he’s seen through to the end of the game and you’ve already lost; it’s a string of captures, and these games are always brilliancies. he protects his pawns even at the cost of a tactical advantage, and you’ve always thought he’d make a good general because of it. someone you’d be proud to follow, because he knows the value of a life.

then in cards. it’s not cheating, exactly.

but capitol is the greatest metagame – who has influence, how the board votes, who can be bribed, who’s worth spying on. the most exhausting, because it is a game without pause for breath and without end. lex plays it better than you; he always has. he reads people like they’re open books, and he writes his influence into them like a palimpsest. 

not without a price; you’ve seen how it eats at him, you’ve seen him on nights where he’s worn and discarded so many masks that he’s lost sight of which is true. he can be anything anyone wants him to be, for a short while, but sometimes you worry that he will forget his own heart.

you are not the shapeshifter he is, but you play the hunger games better. not at first. the first year you made a bet with lex, you lost. then you studied the vids, hours and days and weeks of footage, and you began to see the patterns. each games is in conversation with the ones that came before; each head gamemaker has his or her own taste. every element of design in the arena has a purpose. once you understood that, the thousands of variables in each games became, if not predictable, then susceptible to influence.

beside you, aurelius hums the notes of the anthem as the capitol seal bleeds across the sky of the arena, followed by the picture of the girl from district two.

“eighteen tributes dead in the first week,” you say offhandedly, because in the arena the gamemakers are gods, but they are not without their own interests and not without constraint. and everyone who wants something can be played, even gods. “at this rate these will be the shortest games of the decade.”

gamemakers have been killed for less. his eyes flick to the blood on your shirt.

“you’re looking pale, aurelius. you should eat something.”

#

maybe it does nothing, maybe it buys her one night. either way, kara survives. there are shadows under her eyes but she’s awake before you are, opening the canisters of sponsor gifts that accumulated as she slept. she takes the medicine you sent.

the gamemakers call for a feast, and the table is set for six. she doesn't show. instead she walks in the other direction, away from the cornucopia, into the mountains.

(it's an empty feast: a five course meal with tableware of the finest silver, but none of the gifts the gamemakers promised.)

and when the girl from district three hides in the cornucopia with her improvised electroshock weapon, when the air crackles as she stops the district eight tribute’s heart, kara is not there.

she curls up to sleep under a stand of trees in the rain shadow, her breaths fogging in the cold air and feeding the misty mountains. you watch the feed from your bed. it’s quiet, the only sounds in your room the breeze sieving through the trees in the arena and yesterday’s gunshot still ringing in your ears.

you think about that cell. the water rippling, the gun recoiling, and adam the sacrifice.

see to the end of the game, lex is always telling you. and for the space between breaths you have a certain clarity; you see the chess board of capitol the way he must see it. how frail capitol is, how delicate, a tower of cards that uses cruelty to shore up defenses that will never hold. how the luthors will be the first to fall. 

but also: how the peacekeepers are capitol’s sword and shield. without them, capitol is a bare king.

you don’t doubt their loyalty. but lillian doubts yours. and for the first time you wonder if she’s made a mistake, sending you to the peacekeepers. you thought it was exile, and maybe that is still true, but she gave up something in return. she gave you power. your own this time, not borrowed from your father or from lex. it is the only currency in panem that matters.

and it occurs to you that maybe, just maybe, lillian is afraid of you. because you have a company; what could you do with an army?


	12. Chapter 12

XIII. (kara)

something soft brushes your cheek as you come awake. they’re lighting the weeping candles for you, is your first thought. you blink sleepily. the small flames evaporate into the mist, kindle back to life, evaporate again. you reach out for one of them and it doesn’t burn you. the spark lands on your skin, but the fire is cold. you catch a glimpse of wings.

fireflies. they don’t bite (if they do you haven’t felt it yet) but they swarm thick around you, casting enough light that you can see each blade of grass and the veins of the leaves on the ground, like a living torch. like a beacon – and suddenly you’re on your feet and running. from the ridge you look down into the arena and gravity tips, because the arena floor so far below you is both inky with darkness and encrusted with light. as if the sky and all the cut facets of its stars are a broken tapestry, rich folds pooling on the ground.

two of those stars converge on each other near the cornucopia. when they finally collide, a cannon rumbles through the arena, and you can’t believe you didn’t realize it sooner. each cluster of fireflies is a light, each light a tribute.

fear settles heavy in your stomach. there’s a light moving toward you.

 

XIV. (lena)

lex loses your bet. it is the tenth day of the games and the tributes have taken to hunting at night and sleeping during the day, when the sun is bright enough to drown the fireflies. they’re drawn by chemotaxis to exhaled breath, like sharks to blood, and they light up not only the tributes with their fire, but also the mutts.

(for the district eleven boy, a lesson learned too late.)

the girl from district three weaves a spool of wire into a fine mesh, attaching it to the tines of her electroshock weapon and using it like a dredge. the air cracks with the sound of a thousand small whips. her fireflies drop to the ground.

when she tracks the last career, she has the advantage of darkness and her footsteps are silent. the district one tribute is dead before she can draw her swords.

lex winces. “in retrospect, the fireflies were a poor choice.”

#

on the eleventh day there’s a knock on your door.

“come eat food with me,” jack says without preamble when you open it. he gives you a puppydog look, hopeful and mournful at the same time. impossibly earnest. you’ve never been able to say no to that look. 

half an hour later you’re sitting across from him, on the terrace of a restaurant overlooking the avenue of tributes. at the center of it, a fountain babbles over a bed of greening coins.

there are children in the street below, playing at tributes and screaming with laughter. one boy swings a plastic scythe – the blade backward, you notice – at a fair-haired girl, who parries sloppily with her double swords. the plastic bends under the pressure. catching his weapon in the intersection of her two blades, she wrenches it out of his grasp, and the scythe lands with a dull thunk on the ground. she thrusts the tip of a sword at his heart, and the boy dies dramatically. the girl laughs and helps him to his feet.

“did you ever play?” jack says, following your gaze.

“it’s unbefitting of a luthor to emulate a district child,” you say in your best luthor inflection. it’s a learned thing, something you chose to acquire, but years later it’s still a glove that doesn’t quite fit. (lex said: never explain yourself, don’t qualify what you say, say it like you don’t know the word sorry.) done well, it should be the fall through black waters in winter and the ice knitting itself together above your head.

jack winces. “now that’s just spooky.” 

“what would be the fun if it weren’t?”

“it’s too bad, though. I could see it, beautiful woman with a sword–”

you laugh. “flattery will get you nowhere, jacky.”

“well, _I_ had a set of throwing knives like that as a kid. came with the fake blood and everything. that whole summer all my clothes were pink because I’d put them in the laundry with everything else. my mom hated it.”

it used to eat at you, the way he talks about family, the way he belongs, easy as breathing. you never begrudged him that, but you coveted it. and even then you knew that longing would warp you, that your chest would crack under the force of that wanting. now it’s just a familiar twinge.

the waiter comes back with your orders.

“you’ve stayed away,” jack says once the waiter leaves. his tone is arch, but there’s hurt in his voice too.

“it wasn’t my choice to go.”

“didn’t say goodbye when you left, though. didn’t say hello when you came back.”

“I was trying to–”

he waves away your protest. “no, no, believe me, I get it. safer for me to be seen as lex’s friend than yours. still stings, though.” he leans forward. “because I _am_ your friend, lena. before I was lex’s, I was yours.”

“I’ve never doubted you.”

“but you don’t trust me, either. I swear, you and lex make it so hard sometimes. it’s always you and him against the world, and everyone else is just on the outside, looking in.” 

“you sound jealous,” you say, teasing.

“maybe a little.” he swirls his wine, expression turning serious. “how are you? after the other day.”

you shoot him a warning glance over the rim of your glass. he is less than circumspect at the best of times, but this is reckless, even for him. you’re on a public terrace in the middle of capitol, surrounded by other patrons. anyone could be a spy: the family at the next table; the man in the purple suit, puzzling over a crossword; even the schoolchildren with their eyes glued to hunger games feed, playing on the several-stories-tall screens on the facade of the building across the street. anyone can be bought.

“I'm sorry for what you had to do," he presses. 

his voice is warm like it’s always been, but a whisper of disquiet dances up the nape of your neck. the words feel leading, a staircase winding down to a catacombs. for the first time you wonder if he’s changed in the months you’ve been away. you wonder why he survived when lillian turned over the board. and you guess you prove him right, because in that moment you're no longer sure of him. 

apprehension curls into you, a familiar weight against your sternum. maybe you’ve been away from capitol too long. the old anxiety is a restlessness in your fingertips, a constant vigilance worn paper-thin. you didn’t know it was ever gone, until it came back. in this place of sharp claws and wolf teeth, you’ve let down your guard. 

you shrug. “it was necessary.” you can keep your own counsel; lex does.

jack sighs, goes back to his steak like he knows you’re shutting him out. he doesn’t try to change your mind, and you love that about him. (trust is a different question altogether.)

you glance across the avenue, at the games feed. the giant screens are bright in the fading sunlight, and the district twelve tribute sits with his knees drawn up, skimming the grass with one hand. his eyes have a faraway look to them. for a moment you want to hold him here, in this calm between storms – but then, you’re the one who brought him here, who put him on that train.

the fireflies are dying. they drop by the hundreds, and there’s something apocalyptic in the exoskeletons that litter the arena like a covering of dust. you see kara grimace as she wakes up to dead wings all around her, shakes the corpses out of her shirt and hair. the feed cuts away again, the official broadcast much more abridged than the multi-camera view you could pull up on your desk.

you pluck the chocolate garnish from your dessert and eat that first. it’s cast in the shape of a mouse, and tastes of earl grey tea.

jack steals a bite of your cake – a rectangular slab of cheesecake, with a spiral of orange peel and a twist of chocolate cleverly arranged to resemble a mousetrap.

“are you happy,” he says finally, “with the peacekeepers?”

“I– don’t know.” it’s all you have to give, this scrap of honesty, because you’ve never thought about it. capitol asks certain things of you: deception, indifference, to play the games of power. it doesn’t ask that you be happy. you belong to the peacekeepers now; it simply is. 

“what’s it like, the districts?”

foreign, you think. the mattresses are thin and the food is bland and the showers have no water pressure. but there are things you love about it – the mountains and the orchards and the rivers, everything in motion, everything alive, so different from the looming skyscrapers of capitol. 

“simpler,” you say, as if that encompasses the way even the changeless things are changed. in capitol your sleep is shallow, chased along the edges with unnamed monsters. but in the districts, your muscles exquisitely sore after training with the peacekeepers, when you sleep it’s like giving in. there’s freedom in that, the oblivion and the surrender. in the districts you are more lena and less luthor.

three dessert courses and a coffee later, you get up to leave. it’s late, the sun long since hidden behind the training center.

on your way out, jack stops at the fountain and flips you a coin. seven-sided, your favorite denomination.

“make a wish,” he says.

when you first came to live with the luthors, you used to wander into lex’s room when you couldn’t sleep. at dawn he’d take you out to the lake behind the house and you’d look for stones. the smoothest, the flattest – you’d wish on them until they were warm in your palms, and then you’d hand them to lex. he was twelve to your seven, older and stronger, and he’d skip them across the surface of the lake for you, across the ice if it was winter.

one wish to every morning. you made the same wish every time; you brokered deals and algorithms in your head: if it skips exactly three times, and curves a little to the left, your wish will come true. if, if, if. it didn’t work. even back then you knew it wouldn’t; people don’t come back from the dead. but it made you feel better to try. 

one day you just stopped. lex never asked why, and you’re not sure you know. you still love the sound of it though, the soft plinks across the water as the stone fights gravity, fights its own nature in the seconds before it sinks.

you close your eyes.

the wish you end up making is amorphous, but it feels like _reaching_ and like sunlight in winter.

you drop the coin.

#

it’s 2 a.m. and a chain of pods goes off along the outer edge of the arena.

you’re perched on the arm of one of the couches in the training center common room, lex standing beside you. a few mentors and ancillary gamemakers gather around the screens, nursing flutes of champagne. the feed takes up an entire wall, the resolution pristine, and the surround speakers amplify every sound in the arena as the mountains shift, sheets of rock collapsing down the slopes with a deafening roar.

the district three girl is furthest from the leading edge, and disappears into the field surrounding the cornucopia. kara is still slip-sliding down the flank of the mountains as the ground shivers under her feet. she stumbles in the dark, but as she regains her footing she looks back. 

there’s an arena jacket in the rubble, caked in dust. a hand. 

“carter!” she grabs him by the wrist so she can pull him free and turn him onto his back. his dark hair is matted with blood; his eyes are open.

kara staggers back, the back of her hand coming up to cover her mouth. she chokes back a sob, barely audible over the growling of the landslide, and she’s moving again before she can be dragged under. 

when she reaches the bowl at the foot of the mountains, the earth settles, abruptly tamed. the avalanche has cut off all egress back into the mountains. 

an avox walks past with a tray of cucumber sandwiches. you take one for yourself and pass one to lex. the avox moves on, stopping in front of cole as she makes her rounds. beside him, alex shakes her head at the sandwiches, her mouth tight with worry and her fingers tapping an erratic rhythm at her side.

“I’m going to get a drink,” lex says. “want anything?”

you shake your head. “I’m good.”

you’re aware of wiress pacing somewhere behind you, her nervous energy fizzing through the room. flux steers her to the nearest couch and takes her hand, his eyes never leaving the screen. district three hasn’t had a victor in more than a decade.

the remaining mentors trickle into the common room singly and in pairs, sensing the impending conclusion of the games. most look bleary-eyed, as if they’ve just awoken from sleep: the mentors whose tributes are already dead. finnick catches your eye from across the room and gives you a tired smile, raising his glass in a wordless toast. you lift your half-eaten sandwich in acknowledgement.

someone staggers into you, almost knocking you off the couch. you smell the alcohol rising from his pores before you see him – haymitch, deep in his cups with no tributes left. his eyes are glazed with whiskey.

“watch it,” lex warns as he comes back with his drink, shoving haymitch away with his free hand. he takes a seat next to you on the couch.

gloss curls his lip, but his gentleness surprises you as he leads haymitch out of the room. 

you turn back to the feed. kara’s circling the field around the cornucopia, head cocked as if she’s listening for the other tribute’s movements, her breathing. all you hear is wind soughing through the tall grass. she stays well outside the field, as she should; it would be a tactical disadvantage to lose her sight line. she’d never see the other tribute coming.

the camera cuts to the district three tribute crouched beside the cornucopia, weapon in hand. she watches kara through the breaks in the grass, turning every so often to keep her in view. they’re deadlocked. in chess it might be a stalemate, but you do not draw in the hunger games. either kara will wait her out until she decides to leave the shelter of the field for food or water, or the district three girl will wait kara out, because sooner or later kara will need to sleep, and there’s nowhere in the arena left to go.

kara settles down to wait for the night. she takes a water pouch from her pack but she doesn’t drink, just turns it over in her hands, lost in thought. there’s a crease between her eyebrows, and you wonder what’s going through her head. 

the district three tribute huddles in the mouth of the cornucopia. she fiddles with her electroshock device, filing the tines of the electrodes into sharp barbs. she coils snippets of wire into springs, shaping them around a metal rod and cutting her hands on the wire as she does. even in the moonlight you can see old nicks and scars on her skin from previous efforts.

you can guess what she hopes to accomplish with the last-minute modifications; the springs are meant to store energy such that, once released, the device will function similar to a projectile weapon. but the wire is thin and the springs floppy, and you’re skeptical of the accuracy. even with the added length to the electrodes, the weapon won’t reach kara where she’s sitting outside the field – but it will make the district three girl that much more dangerous at close quarters.

kara gets up then, and unscrews the mouth of her water pouch. she walks along the perimeter of the field, pouring water onto the grass as she walks.

a murmur slinks through the common room at the waste. _what is she doing?_ you watch cole watch kara, his eyes narrowed, appraising. you see fear and hope warring on alex’s face.

the district three tribute tenses at the splashing sound and works faster.

kara goes through three pouches of water. when she’s made a complete loop around the field, she digs around in her pack again and brings out a box of candles. you recognize them from that first night you went to see alex. your heart is in your throat. 

lex shakes his head. “clever.”

lining up a row of candles between thumb and index finger, kara strikes a match and runs it over the tops of the candles. she throws the match into the field first. then candle after candle. some gutter out before they hit the grass, but enough of them stay lit.

and the field burns.

you hear the whoosh as it all catches, flames humming as they lick their way up dry stalks. the light from the screen throws frenzied shadows across the common room, a study in contrasts.

the district three tribute screams, high and keening and inhuman, and kara’s eyes are shiny with reflected fire.

she shifts as the district three girl comes crashing out of the field, her clothes on fire and her hair blazing like a glory. kara grips her scythe in both hands and runs the tip into her heart.

it’s 4 a.m., and a cannon shot booms through the arena.

in the wake of the cannon, a hush falls over the common room. cole puts an arm around alex, pulling her close, and she rests her head against his shoulder in relief. to their right, wiress sits unmoving on the couch, her spine straight. flux squeezes her hand, and she gives him the barest of nods.

an announcement reverberates over the arena. “I am pleased to present the victor of the 70th annual hunger games. ladies and gentlemen, I give you kara zor-el!”

the arena is still burning, and kara stands over the district three tribute’s body with the same otherworldly stillness she had when you passed her in the training center hallway weeks ago. the flames inch closer, hypnotic, but even so she holds her ground as if daring them to singe her. behind her, the cornucopia shimmers, warping in the heat mirage.

#

they airlift her out of the arena, and the hovercraft touches down at the southern gate of capitol.

you wait there for her with lex and lillian, surrounded by a retinue of peacekeepers you don’t know. alex and cole stand off to the side, giving the soldiers a wide berth.

the hovercraft doors lower, and kara walks down the ramp. her gaze flicks over your honor guard for a split second before focusing on her mentors. she goes to them – a little unsteady, her expression unreadable – and alex throws her arms around her. kara hugs back, solid and strong, but she doesn’t melt into it. you always thought they were close, that she and alex knew each other before the reaping, but maybe you were wrong; maybe they are still strangers.

when they part, cole puts his hand on kara’s arm. “you did good.”

she nods.

cole tilts his head subtly, indicating the honor guard, and kara walks over.

lillian places a crown of laurels over kara’s bright hair. “congratulations on your victory.”

“thank you, president luthor,” kara says, stilted and formal.

she goes down the line, and lex grins when he holds out his hand. “congratulations. it was an exhilarating games to watch.”

(your mother wipes her palm on the fabric of the skirt once kara passes.)

and then kara stops in front of you. she smells like smoke. there’s no recognition in her eyes – why would there be – but you don’t know how you ever overlooked her before, because she’s luminous. there is more power in this woman than you’ve ever seen in capitol; she’s incandescent with it, and with an anger she can’t quite hide under the sorrow. you would follow that strength to the ends of the earth.

“congratulations,” you say, blood thrilling in your ears, and you offer your hand. her fingers brush your palm, and a shiver slips down your spine.

#

at the post-games interview kara is gracious and full of smiles and she’s never looked less happy, less…just less. the wound on her arm is healed, knitted closed along a ropy scar. she talks about how she learned to use a scythe and what went through her mind when she learned of her district partner’s death and what she wants to do when she gets home. her laughter is bright, but her eyes are ashes.

later you pull up the feed in your room, and you can see it: the pupils mere pinpricks against the blue of her irises.

the bidding starts at a thousand. everyone wants a night with the girl from district nine. they say she’s beautiful, they say she’s wild like a forest fire and they brag that they will be the one to break her in.


	13. Chapter 13

XV. (kara)

“welcome home,” alex says as she turns the key in the door. the bolt clicks and the door opens and it’s not quite home, is it, this stone house in the victors’ village that you’ve watched a hundred times from afar. she threads the key onto a keyring with a thin blue leather strap. “there,” she says, handing it to you.

you curl your fingers around the brass, still warm from alex’s hand. the ridges bite into your palm. you’ve never owned anything that required a lock, before. on your old street neighbors breezed in and out, sharing food and gossip; no one locks their doors in district nine. it’s the things that belong to capitol that are locked: the silos, the warehouses, the justice building. 

the house has been empty for decades, longer than you know, and you thought the air would be stale but instead there’s a breeze through the open windows and so much light, glazing the wood floors, pouring over the stairs. alex walks you through the house. it’s bigger on the inside, more rooms than you could have imagined. in the dining room there are eight chairs tucked around a long table and you almost laugh at the absurdity; there’s only one of you. 

you run a finger absently across the table top, tracing the wood grain. there’s no dust, you realize. on the table top, on the windowsills, nothing. “who did all this?”

and then the room folds in on itself and your heart staccatos and your skin prickles as the flush blooms down your arms, across your chest. you picture avoxes standing in this room, touching every surface, the lingering imprint of their footsteps on this rug, capitol hanging like a wraith over this house and you have to live here, this was supposed to be sacred. you were supposed to be safe. you’re leaning with your hands on the table as your throat closes and alex, alex is reaching out and–

“hey. hey, you’re okay. kara? it’s not capitol. I thought that too.” her palm smooths small circles on your back and the panic eases, slinking back into the dark waters of your mind. “come on,” alex murmurs, “I’ll prove it.”

she leads you to the kitchen. the counters are covered with food – braided bread brushed with egg, hominy filled with meat and wrapped in corn husks, chicken broth with curls of onion so soft they melt in your mouth. watermelon and blueberries and strawberries. goat milk and eggs still warm from the farm. enough to feed a family for a week. and the food in capitol had been art, but this food, this food is home.

(you just wish you could have brought winn home with you.)

“who did all this?” you ask again, and this time alex shrugs.

“friends. neighbors.”

“they should keep this, alex. it’s a lot; they need it more than me.”

“it’s not about need. you give them hope, and they want to thank you. let them.” she sighs. “it’s a gift, kara, take it.”

you study the row of small glass jars lined up along the countertop, filled with dried flowers and herbs. feverfew, mint, skullcap, valerian, and some you don’t recognize. you prise open one of the lids, inhale the light fragrance of hibiscus. 

“okay.”

“okay,” alex repeats, almost to herself. she’s quiet as you pop a blueberry into your mouth, and then another. she won’t look at you. you watch her hands as she fidgets, rolling her index finger against the pad of her thumb, her other hand fluttering at her side.

“what’s wrong?” you ask, sliding the carton of blueberries towards her.

she shakes her head, closes her eyes as she takes a breath. “when you’re called to the capitol on business–” she trails off, but you hear the strain as she tries to keep her voice even. 

“what business could the capitol have with someone like me?”

“that’s the thing. it’s not business.”

“then what?”

alex narrows her eyes and tips her head a fraction, as if you should just _know_. and then you do. 

you think of a stranger’s hands on you, a stranger’s mouth on yours. from one nightmare and into another.

“they can’t do that.” even though you know perfectly well they can.

“don’t go,” alex says. “you have no family left; they have no leverage over you. tell them no.”

but alex still has family – you’ve seen her mother in the market, sometimes – and it dawns on you what she’s done to ensure that, what cole maybe has done for his sister.

“they took my father,” she says, as if in answer to your unspoken question. “–because I said no. and then they came back, and they asked would I change my mind. and I said yes.”

“do they– do they call everyone?”

“no. I don’t think so.”

“then how do you know they’ll ask for me? maybe they’ll just forget.”

“kara. they’ll call.”

you run your nail against the hem of your shirt, over and over, as the silence condenses in the air between you. “does your family know?”

“no, and you’re not going to say a word,” alex says, her words scorching, and you catch a glimpse of the fierceness that brought her through the games and to the other side.

“I won’t,” you promise, and she softens.

“you should put this stuff in the fridge.”

“I will.”

alex reaches up to tuck a loose strand of hair behind your ear. “get some rest. and come over for dinner.”

“but there’s so much food–”

“seven,” she says, and closes the door behind her before you can argue.

with alex gone, the house smothers you with its emptiness. you put away the food, trudge upstairs, take a shower. like the rest of the house, the bathroom too looks almost lived in, towels neatly folded next to the sink, a new cake of soap wrapped in paper beside them.

you towel your hair dry as you peek in the other rooms on the second floor: a study, a library of empty shelves, a bedroom. there’s a quilt spread over the bed, off-white, embroidered at the edges with a braided snake eating its own tail, and your breath catches in your throat. the stitching is familiar, careful, the bright colors taken from your childhood.

every few handspans the knots in the snake open up, a little motif nestled in the gap, and you recognize these too. a whale swallowing a small ship with white sails. a candied house. a sleeping king. a wolf padding along beside a girl in a red cloak, the hood pulled so low that her face is obscured by shadows. a boy sitting cross-legged in a clearing, opposite a red fox. they’re plucked from stories astra used to tell you, before kal died. you’d almost forgotten them.

astra, who put her hand over yours the time you mistook a milk snake for a coral in the fields. astra, who pointed to the bright bands on the snake, red touching black, before you could kill it. “don’t hurt what won’t hurt you,” she’d said.

later that night she sat on your bed with kal on one side and you on the other, and told you about the snake that lives at the edge of the world. _the snake is the umbilical cord, little one,_ she said. _it ties the beginning to the end; its scales hold every story ever told, and it will hold your stories, too._

you sink down onto the bedspread and close your eyes, tracing the twists and coils of the snake with your fingers. you haven’t seen astra since your father’s funeral. 

(at the reaping you thought, maybe, maybe she’d come.)

you fall asleep like this, the threads of stories warm beneath your fingertips.

#

it’s dusk when you wake up, the outline of the furniture in the room barely visible in the half-light. close to seven, you’d guess, if not past. you think about going to alex’s. you think about saying hello to her family, sitting down at the table, pretending at a smile you don’t feel. 

the weight of your body presses into the bed, as if your hands and hair sank roots into the mattress as you slept. the shadows grow longer, inching across the floor. you could stay here forever. 

(you should go; you promised.) you could move, you tell yourself. if you cared to you could. 

but time passes, a minute or a century, as you blink at the window until sleep takes you under.

#

“kara. kara, get up.”

alex’s voice sounds so far away. you curl into yourself under the covers.

“I know you’re awake.”

outside, the pigeons whuff to one another at odd intervals, and you would give anything for them to shut up. for the sun to be less bright. for alex to leave.

“kara,” she says again, her voice cut open and raw. “you can’t do this.” 

“just let me sleep,” you mumble. 

in answer she swings your legs off the bed and pulls you up until you’re sitting on the edge of the bed. “hey.” her hand is cool against your cheek. “you didn’t fight that hard in the arena just to give up now. I won’t let that happen.”

the world is too loud. you’re silent. 

“you don’t have to talk to me,” alex says. “but if it’s not me, then it’s going to be cole, and trust me – I’m the nicer one.”

you push her hand away. “get out of my house, alex.”

she nods, as if you’re being reasonable, as if you’re not biting the hand that feeds you. 

“why can’t you leave me alone? I’m _tired_.” you swipe at a tear that runs down your face. “three days ago I burned a girl alive and I can still smell it in my hair and I just– I am so tired, I just want to sleep. I deserve this.”

“I know,” alex says softly, “I know you do.” and then she’s wrapping her arms around you, holding you as you break along old fracture lines, your sobs soaking into the fabric of her shirt. you cry more from exhaustion than sadness; there’s a hollowness in your heart that’s been there ever since you killed reef, and you don’t know if it will ever be what it was.

you’re home now, it was all you ever wanted in the arena, but even home is not the same. it no longer fits. as though district nine is a different place from when you left it, except you know that’s not true. it’s you that’s changed; it’s the shape of you that no longer fits this place.

“I missed dinner,” you say into alex’s sternum when the tears stop. “I’m sorry.”

“yeah, well. you’re in time for breakfast.” she runs her fingers through your hair until your breathing evens out. “it’s probably getting cold now, though.”

#

even before alex opens the door, you smell coffee and sugar and your stomach growls.

“mom, this is kara,” she says the moment she steps over the threshold. you trail in like a shadow.

her mother straightens from where she’s setting out various jams on the table. you know who she is; everyone in nine knows her. they call for her every time there’s an accident in the fields or a peacekeeper’s been overzealous. she set your arm the day your mother died, although you weren’t awake for it; your father told you later. you wonder if she remembers. 

“kara,” she says, her voice warm on the vowels.

you nod. “dr. danvers.”

she ignores the hand you’re holding out, opens her arms to you instead. “call me eliza.” she’s light where alex is dark, and she’s not quite as tall as her daughter, but she hugs the same. you see where alex learned it from.

“can I get you anything to drink?” eliza says when you pull away. “we have coffee, milk, orange juice…there’s water too, that’s less exciting.”

“milk?” it comes out as a question, and you wince. you’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop, you realize. everything in the capitol had a price. maybe not immediately, but eventually, and you had no way of knowing how steep the price would be. even now you’re not sure your debt is paid.

but eliza hands you the glass of milk, freely given, and you look away to hide how your lip trembles. “thank you.”

alex leads you further into the kitchen. “–and you already know cole.”

cole pauses in the middle of flipping crepes on the stove and flashes you a smile, looser than any you’ve seen from him in the capitol. “look who’s awake.”

“can I help with anything?” you ask – regretting it immediately because you cannot, in fact, cook – but he shakes his head and gestures for you to have a seat. 

there’s butter, cream cheese, syrup, at least five different jams on the table. cole brings over a bowl of potato and meat filling for savory crepes. 

“do you eat like this every day?”

“god no,” alex says. “only on weekends.”

you can’t tell if she’s kidding. you sip your milk and watch cole open cabinets and take out plates and silverware like he’s been over a thousand times, and he probably has. he sets the table and helps himself to the orange juice in the refrigerator, and you perch on the edge of your chair with your back straight. you envy him that easy familiarity.

(no, family. you envy him family. alex’s family, but he looks like he belongs, and in that moment you want so much just to belong to them, too.)

cole takes a flask from his pocket, unscrewing the cap. he pours a little into the coffee alex holds out, then looks to you. “I don’t think it goes well with milk, but if you want–”

you laugh. “I’ll pass.”

he barely gets a drop into his orange juice when eliza says from where she’s taken his place at the stove, “it’s a little early for that.” cole’s mouth twists, rueful, but he puts the flask away.

“do you think this is enough?” eliza asks, flipping one last crepe onto the stack.

“not if you expect to have any once these two start in on it,” cole says.

alex flicks the first three fingers of her right hand at him, somehow managing to make the obscene gesture look fond, and cole grins. “for the record, kara’s even worse.” she turns to you. “come on, I’ll give you the tour while they’re finishing up.” 

she takes you down the hall to a glassed-in garden set into the living room, surrounded on three sides by concrete. opening the door, she motions you in. 

it’s a simple garden – a well-tended patch of herbs, small trees growing bent among the rocks, a waterfall at the back half-hidden by the trees and cascading into a shallow pond. the water is clear and untroubled, and you can see the blanket of fallen leaves at the bottom, with their skeleton veins. you close your eyes, let the quiet growl of the waterfall drown out everything else.

“it’s beautiful,” you say, your voice camouflaged in the rustling of leaves and the murmur of the water.

“cole likes it,” alex says. 

“you don’t?”

alex shrugs. “not really my thing. it’s my mother’s garden, mostly.”

and you understand this; it makes sense. because before the arena, you studied alex at every turn, paying attention to the way she moved, the way she held herself, the way her hands fit around a knife. hoping that some of her would rub off on you, that whatever it was that made her a victor was something you could learn, something to wrap around yourself like armor. 

but what you learned about her was this: that she is constantly in motion. fluid, or restless, you haven’t decided. even when she’s just standing around talking to the other victors, her hands say more than her words. the garden, this much stillness, would drive her crazy.

“you’re welcome to come whenever you like,” she adds. “cole’s here all the time.”

you reconsider your image of cole. he’s been nothing but kind under the carefully maintained veneer of sarcasm he holds up, and you never thought he might be haunted too. that he might have his own ghosts, despite having never killed in the arena. you think about him coming here and sinking to the ground next to the water, ankles crossed and knees drawn up to his chest, looking for peace.

“so what _is_ your thing?” you ask.

alex grins, wolfish. “glad you asked.”

she leads the way into the basement, flicking on the lights, and you step onto a padded floor. the give beneath your feet is familiar from the training center stations. along one edge of the room, sand bags hang from the ceiling in a neat row and you wonder why she needs so many, who she spars with. 

alex slides open a panel on the far wall, revealing set upon set of throwing knives arrayed on magnetic strips. there’s a target tacked to the wall, five circles rippling outward, the paper torn up at the center of each circle. so this is how she stays in practice.

“this is illegal,” you say, sweeping your hand at the arsenal of knives. “alex, what if you get caught?”

“who’s going to come down here and look?” she palms a knife from the wall and takes ten paces back. a narrowing of the eyes, a flick of the wrist, and the blade hits just off center of the target. “we all have to find peace someplace.” 

alex holds a second knife out to you and you fumble it; you’ve handled more weapons in the past two weeks than you ever wanted to in a lifetime. the knife slips past your fingers and you reach for it unthinking, the honed edge snicking open a line on your palm. you see the gash before you feel it.

she grabs your hand, seeds of blood welling up along the thin cut. “god, kara, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have–”

“no, it’s– it’s fine, it’s my fault for dropping it, I just–” you take a deep breath. “it was so horrible, alex. the arena, killing those people. and it was selfish, I was selfish; I wanted to be the one to leave, no matter what it cost. I never thought about the price.”

“listen to me.” alex takes your other hand and squeezes. “you did nothing wrong. it’s not selfish to survive.” she replaces the knife on the panel, slides the wall back in place. “let’s get you cleaned up.”

she opens a door on the first floor and you follow, the skin of your palm warm and tingling. the room is spare: three beds, a desk, a bureau gridded with small drawers labelled in neat script, and you know the space belongs to eliza. like the garden, it exudes her same calm. the air smells faintly of antiseptic.

you imagine your younger self, brought here from the silo, grain still caught in the folds of your clothes and the rolled-up cuffs of your pants, cradled in your father’s arms. even as you think it you know it isn’t true; alex hadn’t won her games yet, wasn’t a victor, didn’t have a victor’s house. but you can see it all the same, eliza giving you something for sleep, setting the break in your arm with sure hands. your father beside you, running on too little sleep, the grief still fresh.

alex rummages through the drawers, gathering supplies. you catch flashes of thread and curved needles, dried herbs, basic medicines to ward against fever and infection as she opens and closes drawers in quick succession. she glances at you like you’re fragile, like you’ll shatter at the merest touch.

“it’s just a scratch.”

her mouth twists in a wry smile. “you say that now; wait till my mom skins me for not looking out for you.”

“it’s not even bleeding anymore.”

“alex!” cole’s voice echoes from down the hall.

she rolls her eyes. “I’ll be right back. here, wash that out with soap. sink’s over there,” she says on her way out.

you let the water run over your hands, washing away the crusted blood. there are no towels, and you search through the remaining drawers for anything to substitute. on the third drawer you freeze; no gauze, but you recognize the small oval tablets. they gave them to you in the capitol, bitter on your tongue, and you remember the way they made the world softer, everything softer. morphling.

it’s not a conscious decision – just a reflex, like grabbing for that knife – and then there’s a handful of morphling in your palm and you’re spilling them into your pocket. your heart speeds as you close the drawer softly and alex walks in. guilt kneads at your stomach, but you can’t exactly put them back now, can you?

“breakfast’s ready,” she says as she grabs you a cloth from the long horizontal drawer at the bottom of the bureau. you hadn’t thought to look there.

once your hands are dry, she daubs antiseptic over the cut and you hiss at the sting.

“you do look out for me,” you say, your voice quiet. “thank you for bringing me home. you and cole. I’m sorry I didn’t say it before.”

she pauses in the middle of bandaging your hand. “you did the hard part.”

“still.”

alex smiles. “you’re welcome.” she tucks the tail end of the bandage in at the back of your hand and stands up. “hungry?”

#

the morphling burns a hole in your pocket as you eat. they’ve been careful to steer the conversation away from the games and the capitol, and for that you’re grateful. 

“how have things been in the district?” cole asks.

“quiet,” eliza says. “it always is, during the games. but ever since you won–” she looks pointedly at you. “there’s a lightness. we’re not fighters; we’ve lost the most children of any of the districts, except twelve. but you came back, kara. that means something. you give people hope.”

you roll up your crepe and cut it into segments, each cross-section like the rings of a fallen tree. you didn’t want to kill to inspire people, you think bitterly. but even as you think it you know it’s not fair. 

“no trouble with the peacekeepers?” alex says.

eliza’s lips thin. “jonn took care of it.”

“what happened?” cole says, narrowing his eyes.

“peacekeepers said a scythe went missing from the warehouse. they wanted to know who.”

“and did they find out?”

you watch alex think it through. “it was winn’s dad, wasn’t it?”

eliza sighs. “I had my suspicions. I warned him; he could’ve put it back, and no one would have been the wiser. peacekeepers got to him first.”

“so he’s dead,” cole says, the muscles in his jaw working.

“not dead,” eliza says quickly. “house arrest. jonn spoke for him, asked for leniency from the peacekeepers. convinced them that his actions were out of grief, not rebellion; his son was dead, the only family he had, and he wasn’t thinking clearly.”

“he can be very persuasive. guess he hasn’t lost his touch,” alex says. “jonn and cole were my mentors in the arena. I owe him my life,” she adds as an aside to you. 

“a victor’s word carries weight, but it was luck, too; this month’s head peacekeeper is one of the reasonable ones.”

“was her name megan?” you ask.

eliza looks up. “how did you know?”

“I remember her. she…she drained the silo to try and save my cousin and my mother, when I was a kid. I’ll always be grateful to her for that.”

your mother jumped in to save you, but megan was the one who pulled you out of the grain. you were shivering, and she wrapped a red blanket around your small frame, her hands gentle and strong. you haven’t thought about her in a while, but you remember the way the sun burnished her brown skin, the softness of the blanket she gave you, well-worn and well-loved. she had kind eyes. sad, but kind.

they remind you of winn’s eyes now. dark with laughter, even on the night before you both went into the arena. his shoulder had been warm against yours as he sat with you in the stairwell, both of you unable to sleep. his dad was a carver, he said, and showed you the token he’d bring into the arena: a little wooden bird, perfectly balanced to perch on his finger with its long beak, painted bright. you wonder what happened to that toy.

you haven’t been able to bring yourself to look at vids of the rest of the games, to see how he died. one day you’ll have to – you’ll be a mentor, you’ll have to study all seventy of the games and even then you might not be able to bring either of your tributes home. one day. but not today.

“I should go see him,” you say. “winn’s dad.” you feel it like a debt – his son came home in a body bag, because of you. maybe not directly, but if you had stayed with the alliance? maybe you could have protected him. he should have come back instead, you think. he had family waiting for him. he was missed. 

“no, I’ll go,” cole says, putting down his fork. “he was my responsibility. I was supposed to keep him alive.”

“our responsibility,” alex says.

you fold your arms on the table, absently running your thumb over the faint ridge where the bone knit years ago. it’s soothing, like when you lose your milk teeth and you can’t help but probe the tender gaps in your mouth with your tongue.

“how’s the arm?” eliza asks.

you furrow your brow. “good. healed straight a long time ago, thank you. I wasn’t sure you remembered.”

she laughs. “not that. though I do remember. jonn brought you to me, asleep, wrapped up in that red cape.”

“oh,” you say, your voice small.

alex shoots you a concerned look.

“nothing,” you shake your head. “I just always assumed it was my dad who took me to you. he never talked about that day.”

eliza nods. “I know he would have been there if he could. but how’s your arm, from the arena? that wound looked deep.”

you roll up your sleeve to show her. the tangle of scar tissue is jagged, the skin stretching tight when you make a fist.

eliza tsks. “they should’ve let alex sew. she’s got a gift with sutures.”

you hear the pride in her voice, and alex smiles around a mouthful of crepe.

when the table’s cleared and you’re drying the last of the dishes, eliza says, “a woman came into the victors’ village last night. she waited a while outside your house, but I never saw her knock. you have the same eyes,” she adds almost as an afterthought.

you run the towel along the rim of the plate, even though it’s already dry. hope patters in your chest and you try frantically to rein it in. your pulse races anyway.

“she looked just like your mother,” eliza says, and then you know.

“they were twins. I didn’t know you met my mother.”

she shakes her head. “I didn’t, not in life. I saw her at the vigil. I’m sorry there wasn’t more I could do for her.”

“it’s not your fault. if it’s anyone’s fault it was mine.”

eliza takes the plate from your white-knuckled grip, puts her other hand on your shoulder. “don’t ever say that,” she says fiercely. “it’s not what she would have wanted for you. we want our children to be happy. trust me, if it had been me in your mother’s place, it would break my heart if alex blamed herself.”

“they used to live with us,” you find yourself saying. “my aunt and uncle. but after that day – I think astra reminded my father too much of my mom, and I– I reminded them too much of my cousin.”

you shouldn’t have said anything; there’s so much kindness in eliza’s eyes and you can’t stand it, you don’t deserve it. it’s meant for the kid you used to be, but you’re not that person anymore. no longer blameless, no longer honorable in your choices. maybe it’s better that your parents are no longer here to see this; you wonder if they would be ashamed of who you’ve become. 

“thank you for breakfast, eliza,” you say, suddenly needing to be out of alex’s house, to be alone.

“you should go see her,” she says gently. “family is stronger together.”

“I’ll think about it.”

alex comes over and hugs you, careful not to spill the coffee in her hand. the ceramic is warm against your back. “glad you came.”

“glad you woke me up.” you squeeze back as hard as you can. _thank you_ , you hope it says, and _don’t worry_. 

cole catches your hand on your way out. your heart catches and you stuff your hands in your pockets, the tablets of morphling rattling at your fingertips. (he knows, he must, a thief knows a thief.) he opens his mouth but changes his mind, and says nothing.

in your own house you curl up on the bed and pull the story quilt over yourself and it’s almost like having family next to you. the blanket smells faintly of soap. (maybe it’s wishful thinking.) you imagine the scent of lavender lingering on astra’s hands as she worked the needle. it would’ve taken weeks to make, stitch by careful stitch, and for the first time you realize she couldn’t have known you’d win. you wonder if it was always meant to be a shroud.

it’s not even noon when you slip into sleep again; you don’t mean to, but you do.

you wake up screaming.

the morphling melts on your tongue – frugal, frugal, just one tab – and this time the dreams are quieter, muffled.


	14. Chapter 14

XVI. (kara)

district nine looks the same. outside the victors’ village it’s all the same, and of course it would be: the press of people in the markets, the grey vigil of the peacekeepers along the fence, the steady rhythm of the harvest. you used to be a part of that heartbeat, used to melt into the background, to belong – but now you stand outside it, a glass wall between you and everyone else, and you don’t know how to get to the other side.

they look at you differently, from the other side of that glass. in more ways than one; you pass the vid screen in the district square and it’s strange to imagine neighbors and strangers gathered around, watching, your image looming over them. when you left you were no one; now people nod when they pass you in the street, they pay attention, they grow quiet when you speak. you mistake it for fear, and in that fear you see yourself reflected, a monster in a mirror.

alex laughs when you tell her. “awe is different from fear, kara.”

you think about what she said. a little boy runs up to you in the market.

“kara!” he says happily, as if he knows you, and throws his arms around your legs. you rest your hands on his back (gently, carefully) and press just hard enough to be felt. he’s too young for the games, will be for years yet, and relief washes through you. you can feel his shoulder blade beneath your palm, the knobs of his spine jutting into the pads of your fingers, so small and so breakable. the rise and fall of his chest under the thin ribs and it’s this that has a lump rising in your throat, because he’s not afraid.

an older boy with dark hair weaves through a break in the crowd and stops in front of you. sorry, he mouths, but you shake your head. he smiles, and waits until his brother pulls away before swinging him over his shoulders. “welcome home,” he says shyly before slipping back into the crowd. you watch them go, the younger boy towering over the market-goers from his high perch, and just before they disappear he turns back and waves.

you smile until your mouth hurts.

alex was right, and it unsettles you in a different way. you begin to notice how closely people listen to you, how they defer, how they expect. you learn to measure your words, to consider all sides of a story. they look at you like you triumphed, like you won a victory with glory, and honor. (when in truth, this is how you did it: they were cruel. you were crueler.) they look to you for miracles you don’t have.

(in private, you know you are only an imposter beside alex, beside cole, beside jonn.)

but you try. you help with the harvest, picking snap beans and honeydew and cucumbers, your back turned to the fields that used to give you solace. you spend a few days crouched on the roof of the school, laying shingles and savoring the view of the district from new heights. maybe one day it will be enough.

it’s nice, to be needed, to have a purpose (the arena gave you a purpose, too) (you try not to think about that). you are not a stranger to loss and like before, you push your body to its limit, searching for peace in exhaustion. it doesn’t work. even in sleep your mind is bright and roving; like an ill-trained puppy, it drops things at your feet that you’d rather not examine.

like the address alex found for you, seared into your memory.

you put off seeing astra, until you can’t anymore.

#

you raise your hand to knock a dozen times before walking away. it’s almost amusing – you lived the hunger games, but you can’t do this. the last dregs of the sun drain away, and the sky dusks with your failure.

“kara. wait.”

the sound of your own name catches in your chest, almost painful, and you squeeze your eyes shut. your footsteps still. after all this time, she sounds the same. your mother’s voice had been placid, unbroken as still water, but astra’s was always a little darker, warmer. a good voice for telling stories.

too late to turn back now. you wait for her to come to the door.

when she does, her hand resting lightly on the doorknob, your vision blurs. you look down at your feet. but she says your name again, and your hands twitch by your sides. you walk into her arms, burying your head in her shoulder. she’s smaller now – or rather, you’ve gotten taller – but you still fit.

“aunt astra, I…”

“hello, little one. it’s good to see you.” she takes your hands in hers. her palms are rough and callused with work, the way yours were before the arena. she motions you inside.

you sit down at a worn wooden table, your fingers playing over the knots in the wood. astra brings over two mugs of hot chocolate despite the summer heat, and it’s like the intervening years never happened. she’d sneak you and kal hot chocolate in bed (“don’t spill it, little one”) or she’d take you onto the balcony, wrapped up in blankets, and teach you the stars. you still remember the names.

the archer, who shot down nine of the ten suns that used to hang in the sky, so the earth wouldn’t burn up in their heat. the three sisters, who spin and measure and cut the fates of everyone who has or will ever live. the stag, in whose antlers lie the fixed stars that will always light your way.

the chocolate scorches your throat on the way down, but you sigh at the taste.

you want to ask astra if she remembers. there are so many things you want to say to her, but you can say none of these things without bringing up the ghosts you have in common. your shared past is a still-tender bruise, and if you press along the yellow-purple edges of your own once in a while, just to remember, just to honor them, you have no right to poke at hers. the years in between are blank; you might as well be strangers to each other.

“how are you–” you both end up saying at the same time.

astra shakes her head. “I’m sorry, that was…careless of me to ask. one good thing about the games – at least I got to see you.”

you bounce your knee under the table top as the silence spools out between you. “are you disappointed in me?”

“why would you think that?”

“because of what you said about the games when I was a kid. you said if nobody played, if every tribute stepped off the starting plate from the beginning – if they made that sacrifice – the hunger games would end. once we stopped entertaining the capitol, it’d be over.” your shoulders slump. “but I did exactly what they wanted. I played by their rules.”

she touches your wrist where you’re cradling the mug in your hands. “it was easier to say when none of the tributes were people I loved.”

you fiddle with the pepper grinder on the table, because if she loved you then why–

“I should have gone to you. in the justice building, before they took you away.”

“I waited for you.” for anyone really; you sat in that empty room with the echoing floors and you would’ve given anything to know that someone would miss you enough to say goodbye. (only the peacekeepers came, in the end.)

“and are you angry with me?” she says, echoing your earlier question.

“ _yes._ ” the confession slips past your teeth and you look away, your eyes wet. “but I also missed you.”

astra smiles, slow and sad. “with good reason. it’s okay to be angry, kara.” something she used to say to you as a kid. “and not just for this.”

“what do you mean?”

“kal,” she says, “and alura.”

that name crystallizes inside you, stitching itself into your spine. you haven’t heard it spoken in years.

“we came from a good family, before the dark days. generals and soldiers and strategists. it’s forgotten, now. just stories. but to me they were legends, and I was young, and I thought we could fight the capitol. I thought I knew how to do that.” she takes a breath. “I made explosives, kara. a lot of them, as it turns out.”

“what? how?”

“you know I was an agricultural scientist?”

you nod.

“it gave me access – all the chemicals I needed, the equipment. we had everything ready: charges enough for the peacekeepers’ barracks, for the fence, for the train tracks.”

you have a hazy memory of her lab, more greenhouse than workspace, microscope slides and papers strewn haphazardly over the steel tables. people used to come to her for seeds, hardier than what they could buy in the markets; they’d ask her advice on soil quality, irrigation systems, cover crops. she could coax a garden out of stone, they said, and you try to reconcile that with the astra in front of you, making fire and death with the same hands.

“who knew about this? did my father know? my mother?”

“I won’t name names now, kara. it’s too late for that. but your parents knew. they helped, for a time. but you and kal were both getting older and I– I wanted to move before either of you had to enter the reaping.”

“and then what happened,” you ask. “because we did. or I did.”

“we were caught,” she says simply. “there were always going to be casualties, had we gone along with the plan. innocent lives, in the wrong place at the wrong time. I thought it was worth the price; alura did not. she was bound by more than blood, she said; blood was thinner than right or wrong. and she fed the peacekeepers information, in exchange for their word that they’d spare my life.”

“you’re wrong. she wouldn’t do that.”

“but she did, little girl,” you hear from the other room, the tone sharp and bitter. heavy footsteps, and then your uncle stands in the doorway. “alura betrayed us all.”

“you were walking the grain when they searched the house,” astra continues, as if neither of you had spoken. “the peacekeepers knew where everything was; they took the explosives, revoked my position at the lab. and they kept their word – non and I walked free. but then we heard the grain bridges had collapsed under you and I knew. they never promised about kal, or you. that wasn’t part of the deal.”

your hot chocolate has gone cold.

“story’s over,” non says, walking to the door. he wrenches it open. “you need to leave.”

you stand, and astra puts a hand on your arm. she glares at her husband. “she is _family_ ,” she says, “and the doors of this house will always be open to her.”

“I should go anyway, it’s late,” you say hurriedly.

“come back when you can.”

you nod. “auntie?” you say, turning back. “thank you, for the blanket.”

#

it’s at astra’s that the peacekeepers find you a few days later. non opens the door. his lips thin in displeasure. they ask for you, and he shifts his weight, shielding you from view.

“what is this about?”

“she’s needed in the capitol,” comes the reply.

“she just came back from the capitol,” non points out.

“it’s not for you to question.”

you stand and square your shoulders. “it’s okay, uncle.” you look at astra. “I’ll be back once I’m done.”

she hugs you – you return it stiffly – and you walk out the door. the two peacekeepers fall into position, flanking you on the way to the train station. this time they board with you and stand guard outside your sleeping car. they tell you you’re paid for through the week.

you have time, on the train, to think about your mistakes. alex warned you, she warned you, and you had one advantage. one time you could have been grateful not to have family, because they didn’t have leverage, and you wasted it.

mountains blur past, giving way to flat plains interspersed with rubble left over from the war. the train nudges into the outskirts of capitol hours later, the buildings coming closer and closer together. you see the tall spire of the training center, the heart of the capitol, and then the skyscrapers begin to space out again before the train slows to a stop.

if the victors’ houses are mansions, the house before you is a castle.

the peacekeepers escort you in, each with a hand on your elbow, as if afraid you’ll run. an avox answers the door, and the peacekeepers leave you. she takes you up a long flight of wooden stairs, the narrow carpet woven with intricate patterns that seem too beautiful to step on, and turns down the first hallway. most of the doors are open, light streaming through the windows, the rooms screaming opulence even in your peripheral vision.

the avox stops at a closed door. she knocks.

“yeah? come in,” and the voice sounds distracted but strangely familiar.

#

it’s the luthor girl. hair back in a messy bun, glasses, head bent over an array of tiny metal parts on the desk. you’ve never seen her like this. on vids, yes, standing beside her brother in clothes more expensive than your district could afford in a year. even on the night you met her, fresh from the arena, she’d been flawless. beautiful and cold and empty.

(she’s not wearing the dark lipstick she had on the night you first saw her.)

you’re still in the doorway. you try to stand like alex stands, spine straight, proud and untouchable. you clear your throat. she doesn’t even look up from her tinkering.

you have no idea what she’s making, but you watch her hands as she works. there’s a soft click of metal on metal, almost inaudible, and she makes a satisfied sound in the back of her throat as she puts down her tools. “you know you didn’t have to just stand–”

she looks up, and her presence expands to fill the room. you feel it like a tangible thing, curling around your throat, tugging at your wrists like a lodestone. this is royalty, says a voice in the back of your mind. this is power.

“kara,” she says, and her voice is oddly warm. she stands, steepling her hands on the desk. “I’m sorry, I thought you were lex.”

your fingernails bite into the soft skin of your palm. “you’re not what I was expecting, either.”

she steps closer, skirting the edge of her desk.

“a girl?” she says, a smile teasing the corners of her mouth. (her eyes are the palest green, eyes the color of water.)

“a luthor.” and it’s almost a pretty name, you think, but in your mouth the smooth syllables come out snarled.

there’s a flicker of – hurt? – on her face, but then the clouds shift over the sun and the light changes and it’s gone. you almost believe it.

“I prefer lena.”

she puts her hand on your cheek, thumb just under your eye, and you try not to flinch at the touch. you make yourself cold. but she doesn’t leer, doesn’t try to kiss you. her eyes are dark and appraising. she takes her hand back.

“please, have a seat.” lena gestures to the couch. she pours two glasses of tea, one for you and one for herself, and sits next to you, a comfortable distance away.

the tea is ice cold and tastes terrible, bitter and medicinal, but you force it down. you try not to grimace.

“alex said you helped me in the arena.” the skin at the back of your neck prickles. your palms are clammy. “I’m grateful,” you add, trying for conciliatory and regretting it even before the words leave your lips. the politeness is a habit, but she doesn’t deserve it, this woman whose family sends children into the arena every year for sport.

“you’re welcome.”

“is this what I owe you for it?” there’s cold sweat beading on your skin, soaking into your shirt, and you gulp down the remainder of the tea despite the taste.

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“this,” you say, gesturing between you. but your heart’s racing, your stomach clenches. you screw your eyes shut. it’s dusk but the room seems to be getting brighter, harsher. the walls closer. lena’s hand is on your shoulder and she’s apologizing, apologizing.

“I’m sorry, I had to,” she says, taking the empty glass from your hand, her palm making small circles on your back as you try not to throw up. “I had to. I’m sorry, I know I had no right.”

“you poisoned me?” you manage between shaky breaths, your head swimming.

“it’s not poison. the morphling won’t work for you for a while, that’s all. stay away from that crap.”

“for how long?” you ask. “how long, lena.”

she’s quiet when she answers. “a few months.”

you brush away the hand she’s had on your back. “don’t touch me.”

“sorry,” she mumbles.

your pulse is slowing down, the sharp spike of anxiety fading. it peaks again, hot and sharp, and why can’t you keep your mouth shut because you’re making things worse. she’s possibly the third most powerful person in panem, and all you’ve managed so far is to antagonize her.

(“you think with your heart,” astra used to say, and it was fond; your mother used to say, in reproach.) you are a puppet and lena holds every string; she could ask anything of you and you’d do it, and somehow this is worse than the arena, a tighter noose.

but she surprises you. “is it any better? I think I made it too strong.” she doesn’t sound angry.

“better,” you agree.

“I didn’t think you’d drink all of it – it tastes awful.”

you laugh, against your better judgment, and her answering smile reaches her eyes.

then she sobers, the smile fading. “did you take it today,” she says, “because you knew you were coming here?”

“how do you know I took it at all?”

“the interview, after the games. your pupils never changed, even when the lights dimmed. and then again today. morphling was my best guess; you don’t survive this long in capitol without knowing your poisons.”

“it’s a medicine.”

lena shrugs. “in the right dose, everything is a poison.”

her voice is light, but you wonder if her words hold another meaning, like the two sides of a coin, even though you can only see the one. (you’ve heard the rumors, each more fantastic than the last. that lena luthor is immune to a hundred poisons; that wolfsbane won’t hurt her, but she’s ingested enough over the years that it lingers on her skin; that she kills with a single touch.)

you know that at least one of these is untrue.

you are still alive, after all.

“what do you usually do now?” you ask, because she’s still studying you, those unsettling eyes that seem to look both at you and through you.

“usually…?”

“your conquests.” there’s a dagger in your words, bitterness staining the edge. you hope she hears the mockery.

lena runs her fingers through her hair in exasperation. “you’re not a conquest, kara. you’re free to go whenever you want. that’s not why I asked you here.”

“then what?”

“you’re– it was flashy, the way you won your games. people like you. if not me, it would have been someone else. obviously you know how this works, what’s expected. I didn’t want that for you.”

“I didn’t ask for your help. I don’t want to owe your family anything.”

“and you don’t,” she rushes to say. “if anything I owe you. you survived; I won quite the bet because of that. and I may not have much power in capitol” – you scoff at that – “but I could do this. protect you.”

for a week, maybe. if she’s to be believed. you think of the nights stretching out before you, all the years of your life, and you’ve never felt so tired. “and after? when I’m not with you anymore.” like throwing bread at a starving dog, you think. it only delays the inevitable.

she laughs. “we might not be good for much, but the luthor penchant for jealousy is renowned. they won’t touch you if they think I’ve claimed you.”

you’re about to object when lena gets up, leaning back against the desk before looking back at you.

“I know you don’t trust me,” she says, trailing off. “stay for the week. it’ll keep you safe.”

she says _it_ and not _I_ , and somehow that makes it easier. you nod.

“you can take this room,” lena says, though it’s clearly hers. “use whatever you want. shower’s over there.”

you don’t know why – surely you don’t care – but you find yourself asking anyway. “where are you going to sleep?”

“my brother’s room I guess. he has a very nice couch.”

she talks as if there aren’t easily a dozen rooms vacant in this house, plush beds with the corners sharply tucked, carpet thick enough to sink into. and then you picture the rooms you passed: almost aggressive in their emptiness, the opposite of haunted. they remind you of salted earth, in which nothing grows, and you understand a little better.

“I’ll leave you, okay?”

her hand is on the doorknob when you work up the courage to ask. “lena. how much?”

“hm?”

“how much, for a night?”

lena’s voice is soft. “why do you ask the questions, when you don’t want to know the answers?”

#

the luthor house is freezing, in the middle of summer. you wonder why it’s necessary, and you steal a jacket from one of her dresser drawers. it’s soft, softer than you would have expected for her, and you don’t know quite what to think.

you run your fingers along the spines of her books.

you look at the mess that is her desk, circuits and dials and gears and screws in no apparent order. it’s a marvel she finds anything.

you bury your head on her pillow, and the loss of the morphling echoes in your bones.

something else echoes too, half-forgotten and grown over with vines. a myth you and kal told each other one night, and suddenly your heart squeezes with missing him. chameleons, he said, peering at you from the edge of the top bunk, didn’t used to be so tiny. they were closer to dragons once, and they came in all sizes.

you said: they weren’t alive, not really. the first chameleons were made of glass and fire, and that's how they could change color, because if you look close there are a thousand colors in a flame. they were the first illusionists.

some of them were good, kal said, and in times of war they curled themselves around smaller villages and made them disappear into the forest. whole cities sometimes, untouched by blade or siege or torch when the rest of the world was steeped in war. some were tricksters, and some were only hungry. you’ve heard of one of the old ones, who learned to change herself into a candy house – claws of peppermint, scales of marzipan and gingerbread, tail of smoke, twitching and curling at the sky as she lured travelers onto her tongue.

–but if you spoke a chameleon’s true colors (and some of them were elaborate: frost-of-the-morning-before-the-sunrise, pine-needles-in-a-waning-moon) it would reveal itself to you. it could not hide. many were hunted this way.

–they were valued for their skin, and for their horns. it was said that a skin could make the wearer invisible, and of course many people tried, but a dead skin is just scales and feathers. the horns were the true prize; ground into a fine powder, they could stanch bleeding and bring down any fever. they were hunted almost to extinction, and now the small ones are all that is left of their kind.

of all the stories you and kal made up, it’s not a particularly memorable one. you haven’t thought about it in years, didn’t think you remembered. it’s an unexpected gift. the chameleon in the story, you realize, is lena. you’ve seen her be many different people, and you wonder which of her colors is real.

(things you have heard about lena luthor: _isn’t she beautiful? pity she doesn’t have the heart to match._ )

(things you know:                 )


	15. Chapter 15

XVII. (lena)

she's here. 

you want to stay, to talk, but you close the door behind you. you can't be selfish with her. 

she looks different than she did in the arena. older somehow, in the handspan of a week. it’s made her softer: the weakness of the breath behind her words and the slump of her shoulders when she’s not paying attention, yet there’s a brightness in her still. you’re not going to be the one to snuff it out; you couldn’t even if you tried. (because you are the moth. and she is the flame.)

but the other side of light is shadow, and you know you are complicit in the shadows behind her eyes.

you let yourself into lex’s room, help yourself to a blanket from his closet. he’s lying over the covers, loose-limbed and almost careless, a book splayed open on his chest.

“oh no,” he says when he sees you.

he says it in the flattest voice, and you can’t help but grin. “what?”

a smile quirks at the corner of his lips. “sure you wouldn’t rather be spending the night with your champion?”

you shift your weight on the couch. the fabric is cool against your skin. lex doesn’t move, but he seems to sharpen in the silence. he reads you better than anyone.

“she hates our family, lex. and I don’t blame her, but– I don’t think hatred even begins to cover it.”

“what were you expecting? 

_for it to be easier_ , you think. “I underestimated.”

“I don’t know why you bother. you barely know her.”

you shrug. “she intrigues me.”

he sighs, and dog-ears his place in his book before tossing it on the floor. “this family is a lot of things. and we will always have enemies. but if she can know you and still think that, then– she doesn’t deserve you.”

you smile at the fierceness in his voice. “you make it sound like we’re lovers.”

“is that what you want?” he asks, quietly.

(once, she told a story to a dying boy in an arena, and you don’t know if it was kindness or forgiveness but you marvel at both, just out of reach. her words had curled in the morning mist, green and growing, and they salvaged him.)

you want kara to tell you a story like that. you wonder if she would ever hold that out to you.

“I don’t know,” you say, just as quiet. “do you ever meet people and just…wonder? where they’ve been, what’s made them _them_ , where they’re going.”

“sometimes.” he says it so carefully.

“she feels like that. like a puzzle.”

“maybe she’s not yours to solve.” he sits up on his elbows. “guard your heart, little sister.”

(and you’ll try, in the days to come. but it’s a halfhearted effort.)

“don’t worry about me.” 

“someone should,” lex says, reaching behind himself to throw you one of his pillows. 

you pull the blanket over yourself, clasp your hands behind your head. 

“I need to get back to the peacekeepers.”

“yeah. you do.” he sounds bored, but he puts a finger to his lips before pointing to the ceiling. _the walls have ears_ , you can almost hear him saying. you’re just thankful they don’t have eyes.

you take the jammer you’ve been working on from your pocket and flick the switch, tossing it to lex. he catches it easily, turning it over in his hands to study the casing.

“you figured it out,” he says, with the same mix of elation and awe you feel when you see the things he makes, conjured from blood and bone instead of metal. “how long?”

“ten minutes.”

“better talk fast.”

“I know that sponsors go looking for careers even before the reaping. rumor has it they watch the training sessions, bet on matches to tide to them over between games. I want to see the vids; you have access that I don’t.”

“so you want to borrow my retinas,” he says, laughing. “there won’t be anything there. kara wasn’t even a career.”

“it’s not for her. I want the old footage, kids who were second- and third-best, who never made it to the games–”

“–who became peacekeepers.”

“yes.”

lex gives a quick exhale, laughter but not quite. he leans back against the headboard. “so that’s why you’re still here.”

“I need to know which peacekeepers I can trust.”

“and sparring footage is going to help you with that?”

you turn your palms to the ceiling. “something will turn up. you can tell a lot about someone from the way they fight.”

“maybe. but I can do you one better. every peacekeeper in panem has a file.”

“I have those.”

“not like this.” he walks over to the interface, stooping a little for it to scan his retina. he pulls up a register of peacekeepers and drags it to the wall so you can see it too.

you stand, scrolling through the names with a flick of your wrist, and open one of the files. it’s not the bare-bones information you already have, height and weight and strengths as a fighter. this file is heavy with fruit: criminal evidence, medical records, webs of family and friends, overexposed photos you wince to look at. all the soft spots of a person, laid out for you to see.

lex shrugs. “leverage is better than trust.”

and it stings a little, that he has all the keys to the kingdom and you don’t. (but it’s his, you remind yourself; panem will be his.) you scroll further down the list and another file jumps out at you:

_luthor, lena_

–and the hairs at the back of your neck go up.

lex says softly, “you think there isn’t a file on me?” his mouth twists, the words sour on his tongue. “we’re surrounded by soldiers and spies.”

“my file – do you know what’s in it?”

“no. and you shouldn’t read it, either.” he motions to the interface and the register disappears as he logs out. 

the screen fades, leaving behind an empty wall. the dark glass has never seemed more sentient or more watchful. 

“sleep. I’ll log you back in in the morning.” he turns out the lights, and the bed creaks under his weight. he says into the darkness, “what are you going to do, lena?”

you curl back into the couch as your pupils adjust, turn on your side to see him better. “we could change things, lex. you and me. panem could be different; _we_ could be different.”

he shakes his head. “the companies are kept separate for a reason. they never mix; it’s so corruption doesn’t spread. even if you could get your peacekeepers to follow you, that’s still only one company. you wouldn’t be able to trust anyone outside it.”

“the victors would know which companies might be swayed. in the lower districts they stand between the peacekeepers and the people, make things smoother. I’ve seen it.”

“even if they know, why would they tell you? they’d be complicit; it’s a hanging offense.”

“kara might, if I can get her to trust me.”

you can almost hear lex’s frustration humming in the recycled air. “you don’t need to do this. if you just wait until they inaugurate me, I promise there will be a place for you.”

“it’s not good enough, lex.”

but he’s silent, and in that silence you can feel his hurt, can see how your words sounded a lot like _you’re not good enough_.

“coming home this time, it’s made me realize…how much I hate playing the game. how tired I am of it. it’s changing me – I can feel it, twisting in me. I chose myself over that peacekeeper without a second thought.”

“it was the right call.”

“and I’d do it again. but maybe I don’t want to make those choices.”

“if you don’t make them, someone else will make them for you.” his voice is plated over with steel. then the steel melts, and so softly you think you might have imagined it he says, “I’m tired, too.”

your heart breaks for him, for the boy he might have been if he’d never had to court capitol, never had to wear the callousness he cultivates so carefully.

“there are better ways.”

“are you sure about that?” he says. “I haven’t seen it.”

you can’t argue with him on that. “I believe it,” you say.

“better hope that jammer is everything you say and more, because this–” he says, waving his hand through the air above him “–is treason.”

you flash him a winning smile, even though it’s lost on the dark room. “half of everything I do is treason.”

“promise me you’ll be careful on this,” he says as the light on the jammer flits from green to yellow, “or the only thing we’re going to be is dead.”

and then the light settles red, and it’s too late to answer him. too late to thank him for saying _we_.

 

XVIII. (kara)

there’s a note slipped under your door. you study the script, tall and flowing, and you’re almost sure it’s from lena. it suits her somehow: the elegance of the writing and the deep blue of the ink, changeable as water, feathered at the edges.

you try the door, and it gives so easily you almost jump. 

you retrace your steps of yesterday, the empty rooms looming even colder in the morning light. the house seems almost suspended in time, it’s so quiet. even your victor’s house does not wield silence like this. back home, solitude was a retreat; in capitol it is something unnatural, like walking between the bleached ribs of a carcass, occupying space where a heart and lungs should have been. you wonder how it must have felt, to grow up in these sterile halls and gilded spaces.

your feet are careful on the steps, but they do not creak, and you see no luthors. the house is not completely empty, though; when you get to the bottom of the stairs you see a swish of red, an avox going about their silent duties.

there are two peacekeepers at the front door. the man catches sight of you. your heart drops. 

“hey. kara, right?” he waves. you approach carefully. “I’m james.”

you notice the gun first. at his right hip, half-hidden under the long coat of the peacekeepers. the knives second. three of them, hanging from the leather baldric across his chest and resting against his other hip. 

he’s tall – you have to crane your neck up to look at him properly – and there’s a gentleness in the way he moves. he reminds you, strangely, of home; the peacekeepers can be dangerous, but they wear their claws on the outside. the citizens of capitol hide theirs under bright fabrics and pretty words.

the other peacekeeper holds out her hand. “I am nyssa.”

she has two navy stripes on the cuffs of her sleeves, one for every five years of service. two more before she can be discharged. where james’ cufflinks are plain bronze squares, hers bear the eagle and arrows of the panem seal: a head peacekeeper. and it shows, in the watchfulness of her dark eyes, the unforgiving set of her mouth, the way she holds herself apart. she’s striking. 

“so, where to?” james asks, his smile brilliant against his moonless skin.

“sorry?”

“where do you want to go,” he repeats. “lena didn’t tell you? we’re to escort you while you’re in the capitol.”

“escort me, or keep an eye on me?”

this earns a smile from nyssa. “it can be both; I don’t see the contradiction.”

“and if I said the train station – you’d just let me leave?” you ask, testing the slack on your leash.

“of course,” she says lightly. “is that where you’d like to go?”

you consider it a moment: her offer, and lena’s. the strange mix of sincerity and resignation in her voice as she extended you her protection. the allure of an immunity of sorts from the capitol. 

“no,” you say, shaking your head. “is there breakfast somewhere?”

#

you end up on the train anyway, but only for the few stops it takes until you’re in the capitol proper. nyssa weaves down side streets, but the peacekeepers are conspicuous and a crowd tightens around you, pointing and whispering. your pulse rabbits in your neck. 

back home they stare at you too, but it’s different – they look at you like a story made flesh, and you’re afraid you’ll tarnish in their eyes. here they look, and their gaze makes you lesser: something to be watched, something to be owned. they clamor your name like children fighting over a sweet.

a teenager thrusts a pen at you, sweeping his blue hair off his shoulders and pulling down the collar of his shirt. you scribble over his clavicle, hope it’s messy enough to pass as a signature. he loops his arm around your shoulder and you fight the urge to push him away.

it’s james who steps between you. he’s close, close enough that you could draw one of his knives before he has time to react. you curl your hands into fists instead.

nyssa draws you away, her gloved hand feather-light on your arm. a warning. she turns into an alleyway so narrow the three of you have to walk single file, and holds open a door for you at the end of it.

the diner is quiet, and unlike the rest of the capitol – made drab so its people will stand out – these walls are painted with bright murals. you look around at the tables, and the clientele is a sea of grey and red, peacekeepers and avoxes eating together.

“it’s one of the only places that serves food from the districts,” nyssa says in explanation as she gives you a menu. “what are you hungry for?”

you study the small print before handing it back. “whatever you think is good.”

as she orders, you pick up one of the dolls lined up in a row along the counter. the heads are disproportionately large, almost cartoonish, but the clothing is intricate in its detail, each fold and shadow of the robes falling perfectly. there’s a crown of silver leaves painted over the doll’s dark hair, and gooseflesh rises on your arms. it’s argent’s crown. you recognize it.

you’d thought it beautiful, once.

you look down the line of dolls – you count them now, and there are twenty-four exactly – seeing bits and pieces of the tributes you once talked with and ate with and yes, fought with, and you fumble the doll in your haste to put it back.

(yours doesn’t look like you at all, but it’s wearing a laurel crown and the simple black dress cat had made for you, and it holds a scythe across her body. its painted eyes are black and open and empty, and you can’t seem to look away.)

“kara?” james calls from the table they’ve chose across the room, and the spell is broken. you walk over, and he pulls out a chair for you. your back is to the counter this way, and you wonder if he’s done it deliberately but you’re grateful all the same.

the waiter comes over with the food, steam rising from three bowls of rice porridge, and nyssa smiles. “we used to have this every day in district two,” she says, gesturing with her spoon, and for a moment she looks a little less lethal, just an excited kid who’s homesick. she dips one of the savory crullers into her porridge.

you burn your mouth on the first bite.

“careful, it’s hot,” james says (belated, unhelpful).

#

after brunch they take you around the city – the long way around, nyssa says, and it’s a lot of walking. every few blocks there’s an artisan, and at first it puzzles you.

there’s the old man painting rocks into other rocks: a geode onto an ordinary river stone, sandstone into quartz, and he captures the light and shadow so well that from the right angle you see only the illusion, even as he works. he’s impeccably dressed, fingers heavy with gold and silver, but he’s sitting on an old blanket at a street corner.

then there’s the woman throwing a bowl on a potter’s wheel at the entrance of a park, her wares laid out before her on a plain wooden table. you pick up one of the finished bowls, white with a sunburst emanating from the center in blue glaze, and the ceramic is so thin you can see the shadow of your hand from the other side.

“it’s beautiful,” you say under your breath.

but the woman hears you anyway, flicks her hand at you. “you can have it.”

“oh. no, I couldn’t afford it.” the words leave your mouth before you realize they’re not true, not anymore, not with the money you won from the games.

she laughs, and rinses her hands in the bowl of water next to her. blotting her hands on her shirt, she wraps the bowl you’d picked up in newsprint and hands it back to you. “take it.”

and you’re bewildered, but you do. “thank you.”

you cradle the bowl in both hands. ceramic like this would have no utility in district nine – the lip is so thin you’re afraid it will shatter under the slightest pressure – but it has a particular beauty that suits the capitol: ephemeral, almost destined for a headlong rush to destruction. 

“that was generous,” you say once the potter is out of earshot.

nyssa frowns. “that’s one way of putting it. she can afford to be. the artisans you see on the street, it’s a sign of status. they’re here because they don’t have to make a living, and because hedonism gets boring. she has no idea what that bowl’s worth. you should be more careful.”

“why do you say that?”

“people trade favors in capitol the way we exchange money in the districts. she may come to collect, one day.”

you laugh. “what favor could I possibly have to give?”

“you’re a victor,” she says simply, “and you have the ear of a luthor. many would give their fortunes for that much.”

“I don’t–” your face flames at the implication. “it’s not like that.”

“maybe you have more influence than you think,” james says, but you hear the pity in his voice, and you can guess what he’s thinking.

you meet a third artisan on the outskirts of the city. she’s sitting on an upended milk crate, a portable stove hissing away on the steel table in front of her. you smell the caramel before you see it, bubbling merrily in a small copper pot, a ring of blue flame dancing beneath it.

the woman dips a spoon into the pot, drizzling the sugar over the empty table top as she draws fractal patterns and sweeping curves. you stop to watch as the lines coalesce into amber feathers, the feathers into wings, the wings into an owl that hatches ever so slowly from the caramel.

you have this at home too, made from malted barley instead of sugarcane, diverted from the harvest and drawn in secret. astra made it for you once. not an animal – I’m no artist, she’d said – but a simple lattice of sugar lace, scraped up while it was still soft and curled like the head of a fern. the caramel was dark and full on your tongue, swallowed like a secret. 

it was the stickiness on your palms that gave you away. _it’s against the law_ , your mother said when she came home, and this is one of the last memories you have of her, voice ringing off the walls as astra glared back. 

when she’s done, the artisan presses a wooden dowel across the center of the owl and begins to draw again. a different patch of metal canvas, a different creature. 

“how did you learn to make these?” you ask, drawing closer.

“my father taught me,” she says, laying down the blunt head and rounded ears of a bear. “the trick is to burn the sugar just a little, so the bitter seeps through but not too much.”

“what’s your name?”

“davina.”

“I used to see these, when I was a kid. but not in a long time.”

she takes the edge of the spoon and daubs the caramel into little points for the claws. “that’s what I love about it. it’s just sugar, but you’re doing something people have done for centuries before you, making the same motions. sometimes – when I get the lines right – it feels like someone’s guiding my hand. like a sacrament.”

her words slip through your heart, quiet, comfortable. you don’t know what to say; it’s not what you expected from someone in the capitol, and you smile despite yourself.

she works swirling patterns into the bear’s coat before moving on to a third animal. the distinctive bite of a camera shutter clicks in the air behind you, familiar from the arena, and you whirl.

the stranger on the sidewalk snaps another picture. you shove one hand behind your back, hiding the way your nails dig into your palms. the air itself seems to change, hungry and grasping. nyssa pushes up off the stack of milk crates she’s been leaning against, every movement languid, and comes to stand between you and the camera.

“you’re not a very good liar, are you,” she says softly, pretending to watch the artisan work.

“I never said anything.”

she taps your hand, still curled into a fist. “you didn’t have to. the capitol,” she says, “wants to be loved. by its districts, by its people. give them that, and your life will be much easier.”

your jaw tenses in response, and nyssa shakes her head. “I knew someone like you once.”

you slide a silver dram across the table. (it’s extravagant and absurd, enough money to last you a week back home.) “these two,” you say to the artisan, pointing at the owl and a cat you hadn’t seen her make.

she wraps both in cellophane, hands them to you with a smile. “hope it’s as good as when you were little.”

“did– did you watch the games?” you ask on impulse.

“of course, kara zor-el. everyone watches. it’s delicious, isn’t it?”

at first you think she’s talking about the caramel, but she’s looking at you. the candy is still wrapped in its cellophane. (she’d warned you it would be bitter.)

you turn away. the man with the camera weaves in front of you, walking backwards as the shutter snick-snick-snicks in rapid succession. the lens is close enough to grab, and you imagine – briefly – the crunch of glass and metal beneath your heel. you try for a grin instead. it feels unnatural, like you’re using the wrong muscles, like a cornered wolf baring its teeth.

“enough,” james says when the man has managed to go three blocks and half a park without running into anything. “you’re just getting the same picture.” 

“it’s my right,” the man says, unrelenting. you’re nearly blind with the flash.

you trip yourself on an exposed tree root, staggering against james a little more heavily than you need to.

he waves off your mumbled “sorry”. nyssa looks at you strangely, at the sleeve pulled low over your palm. her eyes flick to the empty sheath at james’ hip.

(the metal is warm against your forearm. it is the smallest of the three knives.)

but she says nothing, and you wonder why. you wonder in between whose ribs she’s hoping the blade will find a home.

(home is a place far from knives, and memory of knives. but capitol? in capitol there is comfort in sharp edges, in teeth.)

when the stone wall surrounding the luthor house comes into view, nyssa pulls up short and the photographer stops too, walking a circle around you and snapping away as he goes. “look happier,” he says, and “pretend you’re chopping down this tree” and “a little to the left”.

“arrest him,” nyssa says to james.

for the first time, the man puts down his camera, and the sound of the shutter stops crawling under your skin. “on what grounds?”

“you’re trespassing,” james says, “on the president’s estate.”

nyssa smiles thinly. “property line was back there.”

james cuffs the man’s hands behind his back, slinging the camera over his own shoulder. he opens the film door and ejects the cassette, handing it to you with a smile. they leave you to make your way up the stone steps alone.

#

you run into the luthor boy in the courtyard. he ducks out from under an arcade covered in trailing vines just as you reach the archway, and there’s no avoiding him. a brindle puppy nips at his heels, stops when he stops.

he smiles when he sees you, bright and warm and like you’re the sole focus of his attention. it’s magnetic – the devil’s charm, your mother would have called it, same as his sister.

(but different, too: he moves with a careless grace, as if he’s never had to fight for anything. lena holds herself like a soldier, like she’s ready to fight for every inch. you don’t know who to be more afraid of.)

“I was hoping to run into you. lena told me you were here,” lex says, and you didn’t notice it the night you came out of the arena but his voice is rich and cordial, with a trace of the aristocratic capitol accent. on someone else you might have called it beautiful; on lex it is merely unsettling.

your thumb rubs nervously over the newsprint covering the bowl, candy figurines nestled inside. you keep your other hand behind your back. the tip of the blade pricks at the soft hollow of your elbow.

“I was just looking for her,” you say. a lie, even though you had permission to leave. “thank you for having me.” another lie. you’re a guest in his house, after all – but it comes out closer to frosty than gracious. 

“you don’t like me.” he sounds amused.

the knife digs deeper into your arm, scratchy discomfort giving way to pain. “you’re a gamemaker.”

“apprentice gamemaker.”

“how come? there are younger gamemakers than you. I would have thought a luthor could buy their way into anything.”

lex grins, as if he’s missed your goading altogether. “you know, I just can’t seem to pass the aptitudes.” he glances at the dog lying by his feet. “case in point.”

they’re a rare sight in district nine, just an extra mouth to feed, but even so you can tell this one is well-bred. it looks more wolf than dog: the tail curled, the paws overlarge, as if it has yet to grow into them. and the eyes…the eyes are mismatched, one green and one blue. wrong-eyed, they call it. one eye trained on this world and the other in the spirit world.

you wonder if they know that in the capitol, in a house that must have its fair share of ghosts.

the dog stretches, extending and retracting its front claws, and you jump. they’re needle-sharp. a cat’s claws. the better to curve into skin and muscle in the arena, you think.

“is that a–?”

lex shrugs. “prototype. genetweak gone wrong.”

“what’s wrong with him?”

“her,” he corrects. “she’s a good tracker. didn’t have the aggression.”

“why a puppy?”

lex frowns. “how do you mean?”

“nothing, just– usually the mutts are adults.”

he gives a quiet laugh. “even gamemakers can’t control time. we engineer the genetic makeup, sure, but the mutts still need time to grow. these won’t be ready until the 73rd, 74th even.”

this is something you never considered, that someone _raises_ the monsters you see in the arena. (you wonder if the aggression is bred, or if they’re broken to it.)

“picture this – no weapons; each tribute gets a mutt that will follow their every command, fight to the death. reduces the career advantage. what do you think of that games, kara? you might be a mentor, when the time comes.” his voice is soft, but he’s dropped the easy facade.

you like him better this way, unsmiling and unmasked.

“is that a threat?”

lex shakes his head once. “it’s a reminder. the luthors can be good allies.” he leaves the _and you don’t want us for enemies_ unspoken.

you hear it all the same.

he crosses his arms and leans back against the archway. his dark eyes are watchful, solemn in a way that makes you think his earlier cruelty was a performance. “she takes risks to protect you, you know.”

it takes you a moment to realize he’s talking about lena.

he closes his hand over one of the vines, wrapping a green tendril around his finger.

“don’t hurt her.” he looks away when he says it, quiet, like he’s showing his throat. and maybe he is; you’re pretty sure this is the closest lex luthor comes to asking. then he straightens, mask snapping back into place, and flashes a smile. “come on, I’ll take you to find her.”

you follow him to the glass double doors at the end of the arcade, the mutt following in his footsteps like a familiar.

lex opens the door for you. “sit,” he says, snapping his fingers, and the mutt whines a little as you leave her behind, but she obeys.

#

it doesn’t take much searching. you find her in the atrium, glass stretching over three walls and a sloping ceiling, the quiet forest beyond. sunlight tumbles through the leaves, dapples the room.

(every year, every panem broadcast, she melts into the periphery. always in her brother’s shadow. lex makes the speeches; she watches. you’ve never seen her like this, light pouring over her, burnishing the ends of her hair a reddish brown.)

she’s talking to someone. his back is to you, but he holds himself tall, like he knows the weight of his words. he wears a coat in high summer, long like a peacekeeper’s but black, brocaded in silver with a pattern that reminds you of grapevines. there’s a curved sword at his hip, the hilt so elaborately filigreed that it would hurt to hold.

there are couches on three sides in the center of the room, but they’re not sitting. you can’t make out the words from where you’re standing, but her voice is colder than you’ve ever heard it. imperious in a way that it’s not with you.

there is war in her eyes.

when the man speaks his voice is soft like taffy, coaxing. he puts a hand on her arm and lena flinches. it’s small, doesn’t even reach her eyes, but you see it. so does lex.

the stranger’s hand crawls higher. lex seems to coil beside you, danger fluttering at the edges of his skin. he’s a gathering storm stitched into flesh and bone, and you begin to understand that with you, his veiled threats were gentle by comparison.

lena glances over as though she can sense the storm brewing. she gives the barest acknowledgement she knows you’re here, and raises an eyebrow at lex. he tilts his head towards you in response, a silent conversation passing between them, and she nods. she turns back to her guest with a painted smile.

(it’s the brightest animals that are most deadly. every district child knows that.)

but this man is not district-born, and he only laughs in return, sounding pleased, sounding like victory. it’s only when lex taps his fingers against your wrist that you realize you’ve stepped forward. he shakes his head in warning.

“let’s go,” he mouths, lips and teeth and tongue soft around the words.

**Author's Note:**

> leave me a comment if you enjoyed/want to see more! (constructive criticism welcome, the more specific the better.) I live for ao3 notifications, and comments are my way of gauging whether a fic's working or not =]
> 
> as always, come throw me asks & coffee & fic recs @ mindthewolves.tumblr.com


End file.
